5SD064 – Game Design Blog 01/03

Level Design and the introduction of difficulty, enemies and mechanics.
Hello again! This is the fourth blog post on my game design blog and this week I will describe my process of designing the level for the game our team is currently developing – Beelonging.
To begin with, Beelonging is what’s called a ”Shmup”, that stands for ”Shoot ‘em up”. It’s one of the earliest concepts of classic game design. Amongst famous retro arcade games you might’ve heard of games such as […]

Background layering

Entry Journal 2018/03/01
In this week’s blog post I will be touching upon the background sprites that I have created for Aetherial. As you probably know by now, the game me and my group are developing is a 2D side scrolling shoot em up, where the player controls a flying vessel that shoots down aliens from the sky.
In order to create the feeling of depth, the background had to be drawn by using multiple layers of content. Much as in the […]

An over-whale-ming amount of whales

Yet another week spent dealing with whales, this time in the form of animation. A couple of weeks ago we made animations for our graphics class, and I made the choice to animate the boss of our game – Aetherial. In our version of the game, that boss is a whale inspired by Moby Dick, a design choice that can be read about here. I of course also made the animations because they were a requirement for the game, […]

Development blog 4: Animation and boss

Good morning all. As one of the artist in group Zombie. I am excited to present you our 4th development blog- the animation and the boss. Now you already know how were the enemies and playable character designed, it is time for me to introduce you to the animations and boss in our Exploration game – Umibozu.
Enemies in Umibozu need animations. Whenever the enemies attack, being attacked, being killed, there should be feedbacks for the players so that the player […]

5SD064 – Blog Post 4 : Dying

Death is a big part of “Depth”. When you die, and you can only die from getting eaten by the monster chasing you, you have the choice between returning to the main menu or restarting the game at the last checkpoint.
Restarting the game means that every enemy and power-up has to be removed from the scene, every enemy and power-up spawner has to be reinitialized, the player has to be teleported back to the last checkpoint (which, in “Depth”, […]

More Bees, Less Bugs

Even though we are creating a game about bees, wasps and beetles, I only want bugs to appear on screen and not in my code. Unfortunately, fixing bugs is a major part of your work as a programmer and can get extremely frustrating when you can not seem to find out what is wrong.Especially after the last playtesting session there were a lot of things that needed to be fixed. For some reason, our main character or his companions occasionally […]

Ink.

Introduction
Creating good looking ink effects in Unity is certainly a tricky challenge, but I have throughoutly enjoyed working on it so far. I will shed some light on my thought process, what results I came up with so far and what my inkredible ambitions for the future are. So let’s dive right into it!

Research. A looot of research.
When I as the Lead Artist originally decided to go with an ink-on-paper artstyle (also known as sumi-e 墨絵 in japanese or 水墨畫 […]

2018.03.01 – Maximizing your Audio budget using pitch variation

Why do we need sound?
In order to help the player enter into the magic circle, we need to consider all aspects of the game feel such as movement, visual cues, and audio feedback. Today we will be tackling the last one.
Audio helps us conveying information to the player by engaging another sense besides visual and tactile (e.g. rumble). Relaying feedback via audio, allows us to:

further immerse the player by making sure all possible sense are engaged in the universe we […]

Smoke and Mirrors

Welcome back!
Fredrik here again, and this time I will bring you a peek into the design process of the AI in my game. As the title suggests, AI is usually not what you’d think when you experience it as the player. For instance, in our game, we struggled a lot with the AI even though it’s part of the core mechanics of the game. The AI is supposed to be what achieves the aesthetic of belonging in our game. You […]

Animation cycles

Hiiiiiii!
This week I am going to write about last weeks art assignment (as I imagine many Graphics minors are). We were supposed to create at least two animation cycles of the same character, and we were encouraged to pick a character from our shoot ‘em up. Surprisingly enough, I ended up animating my beloved pink Fish (!!!!). I decided to make a death animation, idle animation and a turn-around animation.
I started with the turn-around, because I figured it would be […]

Comment on Blog Post #1

Hey duder!
Good blog! Very descriptive. I like how you explain what you were going for when doing the animation of your character, it’s helpful to know – seeing how I have a hard time animating myself. One thing you could think about though is adding more pictures! I didn’t in my blog post either, and looking at other people’s blog posts makes it apparent that it’s more informative if you do!
It would be a more interesting blog post if you […]

Comment on Blog Post #2

Hey!
Good blog, dude. I really found it interesting to gain some insight, as a graphical student, into the programming process – and I really appreciate the detail you went into, without using too much programming-jargon that I wouldn’t likely understand! It helps me in understanding how I can make things easier for my own programmer in the future.
If I had to pick on something, though – it’s that I would like to see more ways in which us graphical students […]