4th blog post of 10 Week Project – Designing The End Game Boss

Since the beta is next week, we have tried to finish the design of the end game boss.
The enemies of the game are made of three elemental types and it was decided that the boss would possess all of these elements. What element she is currently using will be shown by changing the color of the sprite and by having different projectiles/attacks for each element. The visual representation of our boss will be somewhat like the lost souls but wearing […]

4th blog post of 10 Week Project – Designing The End Game Boss

Since the beta is next week, we have tried to finish the design of the end game boss.
The enemies of the game are made of three elemental types and it was decided that the boss would possess all of these elements. What element she is currently using will be shown by changing the color of the sprite and by having different projectiles/attacks for each element. The visual representation of our boss will be somewhat like the lost souls but wearing […]

Animations and life

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. – Oscar Wilde

What is life without motion? What is motion without joy? What is joy without soul?
In the beginning of development to our game (https://lindermeister.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/week-2-of-game-development/) we didn’t lay so much emphasize on animation. Me personally thought that as it was a top down shooter, animation would come in fourth place as it isn’t very detailed animations you can do. We don’t have those […]

Sprint planning + progression (?)

As usual I am going to write about the past week and what I’ve done as a coder in the group. So last week I had a bunch of things to, and the following picture showes what the assigned tasks were that I was expected to do:

 
As you can see there were a total of eight artifacts and the estimated work hours summed up to a total of whopping 52 hours in a week, so it isn’t hard to […]

A week of polish.

This week has been spent doing all sorts of small, often un-noticeable things.
I created a key, which will act like an indicator- To show the player which keys has been collected. This is the only piece of actual HUD we’ll use, but we deem it necessary as we do not want to confuse the player; which key did he just pick up? Was it blue? Maybe green?
Below is the first Mockup I created with HUD in mind:

And here’s the […]

Project Terminal – Menu Buttons!

Is this week seven? I feel like as it might as well be week four. Time goes so fast! But yes, we have almost spent two months on this project and what was mere ideas is now starting to become reality. It’s quite amazing to see.
Now when the game itself has got some flesh on it’s bones it’s time to pay some attention on all the other aspects around a game, like the game menu. One might think that it’s […]

A breeze of fresh air

This week, as opposed to last week, I’ve been doing quite a lot of work.
I started the week with doing some small things to make the environment look less empty. An empty environment is something that really affects the feel of a game. Sometimes, if you do it on purpose, like in Mirrors edge for example it can work really well, making the game world feel like a fantasy, a dream, something perfect. But if your game world is empty […]

A breeze of fresh air

This week, as opposed to last week, I’ve been doing quite a lot of work.
I started the week with doing some small things to make the environment look less sterile. A sterile and empty environment is something that really affects the feel of a game. Sometimes, if you do it on purpose, like in Mirrors edge for example it can work really well, making the game world feel like a fantasy, a dream, something perfect. But if your game world […]

BETA Approaching

This is the last week before BETA.
So, here we are trying to finish up as much as possible before the game is to be put forth for play testing this Monday and later the big BETA presentation next Friday. During this kind of hectic time you sometimes find yourself in need of the answers to the questions you probably should have asked about a week ago when you had two weeks to think it over.
One of these questions is as […]

BETA Approaching

This is the last week before BETA.
So, here we are trying to finish up as much as possible before the game is to be put forth for play testing this Monday and later the big BETA presentation next Friday. During this kind of hectic time you sometimes find yourself in need of the answers to the questions you probably should have asked about a week ago when you had two weeks to think it over.
One of these questions is as […]

Sprites again?

If you’ve been following this blog, you will know a fair bit about the sprites I’ve been making. Last week I talked about the level two sprite. The logical progression is that today I will be talking about the level three sprite, which I will.
The level three sprite was a mixed bag of obstacles. The weapon she would be using had no clear concept at all, the only thing that was set in stone was that it was supposed to […]

Leakin’ dem bytes

Memory leaks are something that programmers (especially those in C and C++) always have to keep in mind. Unfortunately, we didn’t really think about them until roughly halfway into the project. That means we end up with something like this:

Taken from our pre-alpha playtesting build.

This could have ended up a lot worse than it actually did. We didn’t really have any constant leaks, so the total leaks didn’t grow in size.
Now, for those of you that aren’t that into programming, […]