Tail of a Tailorman

The concept that we chose, aptly named ”Suit ‘Em Up”, is about a tiny tailor. He’s been tasked to fight off evil bugs before they munch up his favorite suit!
Given the concepts focus on tailoring and fabrics, our minds we’re instantly drawn towards early 1900′s. With this, an idea regarding the visual design was born in the mind of our dear lead artist; namely that of early Disney cartoons.

Researching this a bit narrowed our visual guidelines down to a few […]

Playground Panic #1 – Player movement

Since we’re doing a top-down shooter, we wanted 8 different directions to walk in that we used the different combinations of WASD for. We also had to make the player rotate depending on where the mouse were on the screen. SFML does this a lot easier than when we worked with SDL, especially on the input-side. We went from having a full input-class to one line basically and if we ever need more control than that we can change it […]

Creating a camera class Camera class (not a 100% done)

Coding a camera class at first was one of the hardest thing in my head because I was thinking the wrong way. I choose to tell you about this simple (yet made harder by my brain) class because I learned something from it. When you are working with more than one person you can have a hard time creating a class when you don’t understand what the person you are working with are thinking. So what you have to […]

Plans of Futura’s Soundmanager.

The sound manager for the game has been quite an annoyance since the development library has a bug concerning playing audio.
The development library we use for the game is SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library) while simple it’s got its own sets of problems for game development.
The problem that I’m annoyed by is a bug that when the game gets turned off crashes the game because off a missing .dll that isn’t missing.

While not finished because of the bug […]

Problem with perspective

What: This week I’ve been continuing working on the tiles for the walls and floors in our game. I have also been working on other elements in the game such as posters and some furniture.
Since our game will be a stealth game we have decided to have a top-down perspective. But in order to get more feeling to the setting we decided on this sort of fake-isometric perspective for the walls, this will allow us to put posters and stuff […]

Watergun Alien

This week I have put focus on drawing sprites. As I have not really done top-down sprites before, I had to learn some new techniques. I googled around to find some reference images for top-down sprites and stumbled upon the classic title Alien Breed for the Amiga.

Alien Breed’s player sprites’ has served well as references but I felt like it would look weird  if the player character had the weapon straight in front of the face. I mean; who the […]

Game dev – Game states

I created three types of game states using Jonas Lundgrens GameStateManager. These are: PlayState, PauseState and CustomizeState. The PlayState holds the actual playable game, the pause state exists as a first state that is entered when pausing the game. The CustomizeState exists for the player to be able to customize stats using pickups collected in the game.
The GameObjectManager
I described how this manager works in my last post, but I will do so again. It stacks states on top of […]

EntityManager, collision is a breeze

It was a little while ago that I finished the Entitymanager for our spaceshooter project. However today I am going to explain how it works and why it makes collision so much easier for our game.
Lets first look at our Entitymanager.h

Which includes a vector of Entity pointers, a SpriteManager pointer and a map that will control collision.
First there is the constructors, which are not really important at this point. One of them contains a pointer to the sprite manager, […]

Artifact : Sliders

The artifact that I will go through this week will be the Sliders.
What is the Slider ?
The sliders I’ve created can be used either as a Health bars or Volume controllers or in any scenario where you have a bar that needs to get re sized often and without effort.
The slider is  a rectangle that grows from 0 being the lowest all the way up to 100 being a full bar, easily set by an integer.

How was the Slider created?
The way […]

Artifact blog #1 Collision

Hi. Time to start writing about the game design course!
This past week Hampus and I worked on understanding and using the collision in Box2D.  Box2D is a physics engine that works with C++, and while only using it for the collision might seem a bit of an overkill Box2D has such a great variety of usage that learning it now can pay off in later projects as well. As far as collision goes here’s a list of the features Box2D […]

1st week of 10 Week Project – Lost Souls

My group, Zwölf, chose the game concept Possession written by another group of our class. We will create this game in 10 weeks, and from now on I will choose one artifact from our game to write a blog post about once a week.
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Most of my work has been concentrated on writing the game design document, and so this blog post will be about the design of the so called lost souls in our game.
Lost souls are a kind of resource […]

Heart of the Machine

When it comes to the design of the health meter for our game I drew many quick design I had on my mind. All just to see what I could come up with.
Overall the design stemmed from having a heart-shaped tank, filled with red goop, that was being surrounded by gears and other steampunk-esque props. So this is a couple of the sketches I made trying to find the one I would continue work on.
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