Enemy Movement Design

In this post I would like to talk about the movement design of our bird enemy.
The bird enemy is the first and the weakest that a player counters. It flies in a covey and moves slow compared to the other enemies. It shoots projectiles when afar, and does an electric attack when closeby. The enemy has different spawn points at the right side of the screen, flying towards the player avatar on the left. It uses all the game field […]

The importance of playtesting

Testing game play in the Unity editor

Recently I realized how important it is to play test your game. I always thought of play testing as a thing a developer has to do every once in a while, but did not take play testing and all of its facets too serious. However, a play testing session that we had at university on Monday proved me wrong.
I didn’t expect  a lot from the play testing. We prepared a […]

Week #2 – Alpha

Compared to my first week I implemented a ton more & learnt twice that.
Player Ship, Health & Aether Bar, and one of our two Enemies
Week #2 – My Activities and Progress
What did I do last Week? 
Last week I created the Player scene as well as the ability to shoot harpoons from the cannon located on the ship,
What have I done this week? 
This week I created two enemies, Player Function Teleport, Updated the Movement of of the Player Ship. Another thing […]

Presentation day for alpha

Today was a somewhat stressful and nervous day for we had our presentation for our alpha.
We have come pretty far with our game compared to some other teams and we are pretty happy about that. But since our programmer had a super busy schedule with all his work i wanted to pick a good day for him where we could meet and plan our presentation well. We ended up picking the day before the presentation to put together our power […]

Blog #2 The Alpha presentation

In this blog post I’m going to cover my process of creating the alpha presentation of our current project – Umibōzu.
Before I opened PowerPoint to begin drafting the presentation, I decided to first go through the Scrum document, which I have mentioned in my previous blog entry. I did this to refresh my memory of what the group has done so far, and what is still ahead of us in the upcoming weeks.
After restoring my memory of the last few […]

A scrolling sprite in unity

The powerup in the game summons a thick cloud that covers the entire screen. When this happens any enemy that is caught in the cloud loses track of the player and instead flies around randomly (technically it follows randomly moving ghost objects using its regular ai). This cloud is represented by a large sprite that moves in from the right along with the normal clouds, to represent movement in a rightward direction. Once arrived, the cloud must continue showing this […]

Post #2 – Using play testing feedback

What?
Apart from the aforementioned  (in this post) online play testing that Group Siren is continuesly conducting all of the student groups taking Game Design 2 (5SD064) at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland attended a pre-alpha play testing workshop last monday (12/2-2018).

Said workshop left us with a mountain of feedback which had to be processed and interpreted in order for Group Siren to be able to make improvements based on said feedback, which I, to the best of my ability have done.
Throughout […]

Designing a new Power up

Hi! Today I’m going to go through the design for a new added power up in the game Umibozu. One of the requirements for the Alpha presentation was to have a power up. A power up was considered to be an item that enhanced the player with an additional ability. The original items that were listed under the power up section in the concept document was oil to replenish the lamp, health kit, temporary speed boost, and temporary increase in […]

Crates

This week’s challenge for me was making the crates. During the playtesting session we had a problem with players not knowing that the crates were a pick up. They kept avoiding them because they thought it was cliffs or something else to avoid. I can agree that it was hard to see that they were crates. It looked more like a reef.
I made a few different designs, but it was still hard to see that they were something positive, something […]

Whale, Whale, Whale – a design process

This week we’ll take a look at the design of the boss. I designed and drew everything in Photoshop CC 2017.
The antagonist and final boss of Aetherial is a whale by the name of Leviathan. Team Qilin, or rather I, chose to look away from the whole sea-monster thing and instead focus on the Moby Dick side of the game. The Moby Dick influences came from the tagline of the Concept Document; “Moby Dick of the skies”. Moby Dick was […]

Boss design

The narrative in Beelonging is that a bear is attacking the protagonist’s beehive and it needs to be saved. Naturally, the boss and the main antagonist of the game is the bear.
Setting out to design this end stage of our game, the initial idea was to have most of the bear’s body visible. This was done with a sprite depicting it standing upright on its back legs, with two additional sprites for its front legs. With this done the bear […]

Animations…Animations

Working with animations was a pretty big stepping stone for me as a person who never had any prior experience. The first time I learned about doing animations in Leo’s class, I was pretty much awed thinking about the capacity of creativity that can be flourished through Photoshop. It wasn’t easy, took me quite some time to grasp the basics. But I did, through many trials and errors and with some help from classmates. The concept game that we are […]