Projectile creation and animation

This week I have continued making animations to the game. Since I last wrote about the dragon’s animation, this week, I will write about the making of the projectile. How it was made and the animation process. 

I started with brainstorming the look of the projectile. It had to have some kind of relation to singing or some kind of tune. The visualization of the projectile should be a beam that traveled from the dragon to the crystallized enemy and shatter […]

Fancy Mansion: Waypoints

This week I’ll be discussing the use of waypoints as a method of pathfinding for our enemy AI. Taking last week’s CONCRIT into consideration, I’ll try to explain the how and why of my programming in a simplified manner that non-programmers can more easily follow along with.
Rather than go with A* Pathfinding, which is an algorithm that calculates the shortest possible route between two points, we opted to go for a waypoint pathfinding system. Our programming lecturer recommended we take […]

Week 6: Animating in photoshop.

Hello!
This week I finally started working on animating. In Photoshop CC no less, a program that I had no idea you could animate in until just a couple of weeks ago. The only animations I’ve done so far has been an assignment for my graphics course, which consisted of a walk cycle for a stickman, and some pixel animations for a GameJam game in GameMaker nearly five months ago. There was also the time in Macromedia Flash about five or […]

Week 6 – Level details

Hello hello!
So last week I got the task to design some vacation details to add to the beach in our version of Magic Writer. This was mostly to increase the impression of our wizard being on a vacation and on a relaxing beach, not expecting the incoming monsters. The details would work as a stop for our character, since the beach would be quite wide we wanted to narrow it down so that the lanes that the wizard can jump […]

The Heads Up Display, early stage [WIP]

So this past week I’ve been working on the Heads Up Display, the HUD for our space shooter project Fancy Mansion. Well, the name is about to change to something else once we come up with a fitting name.
I went through some iterations when working on this task, since I couldn’t really decide on one solution over the other in the beginning until I remembered what a second year student told me about RenderTextures.
Now, remember, at the moment, all […]

Magic Writer – Blogpost 3

Another week of production, another week of blogging.
It feels like I will not have that much to say today due to this week not being so productive, at least on my part. This is partly due to a small change that the group agreed on, and that was to change the sound that came when the player successfully casted a spell. We had earlier decided on a “poof” sound for when the thought bubble disappeared in a cloud of smoke, […]

Programming a Menu for our Mole Munch project

Recovering from the hectic last week where we had to code so much, especially the last days before our Alpha deadline, we now look towards the Beta deadline. Several things still need to be implemented: powerup, improved projectile (the object I was working on last week), graphics and some other things. This week I will be finishing the projectile completely and I’ll also be implementing graphics to our game. But this blog post will be about what I’ve been working […]

Ambient Pressure – Level 2

This week I experienced the worst possible pain imaginable when working on something. I lost it all. To cut to the chase, the valuable lesson here is to save constantly. I’ve always been bad at it, I’ve tasted this sour fruit before, and still I didn’t do it. Several days of work was lost as I accidentally forced shut all applications when restarting my computer, and about 5 complete levels were lost. This should not be happening.
 
So here, in this […]

LevelManager,Collision & Time

Okay, this week have been a slow week for programming and it’s because I am reading Serious Game Design at the side. O well so today I will tell you my assignment I got this week and what I have done.
Last week the comment mentioned that they did not quite get what the LevelManager did and so I am here to tell you.
The level manager uses the library  a library that allow you to read a row or individual characters if […]

Design dokument

Förutom programmerare så har jag rollen som huvuddesigner för Magic Writer. Med den rollen kom ansvaret över själva design dokumentet. Det var deadline för dokumentet för två veckor sen nu men dokumentet uppdateras hela tiden i takt med att spelet utvecklas så jag har rollen att se till att det uppdateras korrekt och det som står i dokumentet stämmer överens med den produkten som vi ska leverera.

Förstasidan.

Det första i dokumentet är där jag kort förklarar bakgrunden och vad spelet går […]

Game development – Introduction: Week 5

This week (besides reworking the defense-plant unit animation as we were advised to do at our alpha-presentation) I’ve started working on redesigns for the enemies in the game, more specifically the melee enemy and its walk animation. The reason for this is to make them more in line with the style of the game and adjust the designs to better reflect their function. The previous design for the melee enemy was nice but was too close silhouette-wise to the ranged […]

The sound of suffocation

This week I have been working on developing the sound for power ups and state artifacts for our game. The one I will describe today is the state-sound for when the avatar lacks of oxygen. Since the avatar is underwater during the entire gameplay, she has a tank on her back that delivers oxygen. The amount of oxygen is displayed on the hud along with ammo and the amount of samples that the player has collected. As time goes, […]