Game Developement and Coding 13 March 2014 – Entity Manager

The Entity Manager
The entity manager is a class that makes sure all objects (or entities) in the game space are updated and displayed on the screen properly.
 
The entity manager can be divided into five parts:
-Add pointers to objects and store them in vectors.
-Update all the objects via their pointers.
-Draw all objects via their pointers.
-Make sure all objects are added to the collision check.
-Check the HP of all objects and delete those that have reached zero or lower.
 
It stores pointers to […]

Addressing Feedback

Apologies for the slight delay and relatively sparse content of this post, I’ve spent most of this week focusing on preparing for the Beta presentation, as well as fixing up my group’s design document for the second hand-in.
Nevertheless, it’s Thursday, so it’s time for another blog post. Thankfully not all of my time this week has been spent writing documents and practicing speeches, as I had some time to address some feedback we got during our playtesting. A recurring theme […]

Tying up loose ends

This week I’ve mostly been working on getting the final editing done to all of the sounds that we are going to use in our game. To ensure an even level of volume I had to apply either one of these tools – Audio normalization or Compression.
Audio Normalization Audio normalization is the process of adding a constant amount of gain to an audio recording to bring the average or peak amplitude to a target level. What this means is that you change […]

First impressions; designing a themed main menu

The very first thing a player sees when he/she starts up a game is, in most cases, the main menu. And since, as we all know, first impressions matter, it matters greatly to set the theme and feel for the game! We had previously decided to have the player play as a tailors ”little helper” (think of the mice in Disney’s ”Cinderella”), and so we wanted to use the main menu to make that connection. As such we concluded that […]

Ms X 2.0

This week I have completed my drawing of Ms X that I posted here a short while ago and I thought I would show you a little more about how I worked.

I had an idea of the pose I wanted, so the first thing I did was searching Google for references of women looking over their shoulder. I found one that had an angle I liked and to save me some time I moved her body and arms to […]

Heads Up Display

Who does not like a good HUD¹?
You can show a lot with a HUD, and there is almost always a reason to implement it. Because you want to be able to give instant feedback to the player. Such as health increase or an increase of ammo.
However making an HUD is not always easy. It is easy to make it clumsy and irrelevant, with a lot of unnecessary information.
Though there is much to be said about HUD’s, the thing that […]

Artificial inteligence

Today I will speak about AI. More specific about the AI we implemented in our stealth game.
This post will cover every detail of how we planned the AI. Unfortunately we have not implemented all of our ideas in code because it is quite advanced and there is not enough time to create it. But we have the most important ideas.
Our guards will use the AI to chase and kill the player. This is pretty important in this kinds of games […]

Music, Game Balancing and Game Design

This Week
The week started of with a Play Testing session, which gave us invaluable information. Since last time Play testing session, we had a couple of points we wanted to show off to the testers, and match their reactions to.
The following points were our most important points we wanted the player to concentrate on:
– Movement
– Colour Scheme
– Sound “Ripples”
– Music
The answers were mixed, but the most interesting feedback (that we actually knew was going to come, as we’ve discussed it […]

5th blog post of 10 Week Project – Implementing Altars

This week I have focused most of my work on updating the game design document as well as listen to possible sounds for our game. However, I also finished implementing the altars in our game, thus this blog post will be about the progress of implementing the altars!

The altar sprite made by Alex Arnberg Untoro.

The progress of implementing the altars is very similar to the progress of implementing the lost souls, which I […]

Week 8 – With Intent

Hello and welcome back, The last week has been a real pain in the ass. I believe I mentioned last week that I got some work to do the then upcoming weekend, I did, and received my payment for it. This also means that I was pre-occupied this weekend and thus my productivity reached a minimum.
This monday I already started to feel the cold lingering closer to it’s eruption point, I had hoped that it wouldn’t break out, and if […]

Backgrounds and .. Movies?

So; What’s been going on this week?
Background, mostly.

I knew that we needed a Win/Lose screen, so I took it upon myself to create some.
I started out checking some resources. Old Soviet propaganda was my first thought, as the main character is a russian spy in Langley, Virginia (At the CIA’s Headquarters).
I then started drawing up a concept for the ‘Win’-screen. I chose a font with a cyrillic vibe to it, and printed the Russian National Anthem in the background. Below […]

I threw it on the GROUND!

Missed the post last night, I mostly worked on the throwing function and had a meeting with Jerry about my Programming1 assignment. I didn’t get very much done between the meeting and having to go home for the evening for a birthday. I got the throwing functionality working at least.
Today we have been working in the Game room all day, i’ve been adding doors all day, at first i made every door it’s own type of object and even had […]