My First Game Design Blog Post

My group Shadhavar has chosen the Selfisch game as its project. My role is a lead programmer for this game and as a first blog post I will write about something quite simple but needed in almost any game out there which is movement.
There are many ways to make a character move, you can make it so the player moves by mouse buttons or just mouse movement, different keyboard keys and controllers. But let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk […]

BLUP, Main Character, Basic Animations

2017-02-09
BLUP, the main character of which the player will take control in our game based on the Echo concept document, is a small explorer-robot-submarine whose sole purpose is the exploration of deep and dark waters where no one else has ever been. What follows is an insight into the creative process leading up to four finished animations for the player movement.
Creative Process
In the conceptual stages of development, it was decided that the character would benefit from being cute and appealing […]

Lighting the scene

This is Anders from team Nazgul. I’ve been handling the more technical aspects of the graphics that we’re using to get the style we want and make our game look good.
There are two main parts to this: normal maps and light ramps.

 
A normal map is an image with colors that indicate values for a vector at each pixel. Lighting objects in rendering relies on the normal of a surface, which tells the direction the surface is facing. This is limited […]

Blog 1

This week I have been working on a concept and sprite for one of the enemies in our game. There are three kind of enemies, all that shoots differents kinds of bullets (electric, fire and ice). The theme of the game is supposed to be inspired by Hinduism in some sort of way, without stepping on anybody’s toes. That is why we have taken the more relaxed approach of “artstyles in Hinduistic countries”.
 
The enemy I started working on was supposed […]

Blog Post #1 – Managing the Product Backlog

Welcome to my very first Blog entry. I am the project manager and producer of team Amarok. Currently we are creating a shoot´em up videogame that uses the concept document “Burn Witch Burn” as a starting point. My work within the team consist mainly of managing the team, designing gameplay elements together with the lead designer and creating sound files.
This week I want to talk about the product backlog. This has been the very first task that our game design […]

Week 3

The artifact I have chosen to write about this week is my creation of a tileable background for our alpha prototype. My role in our group is producer/project manager, but since one of our graphic artists decided to quit the program last week we have had to reevaluate our roles and take on tasks that were not originally planned for us. I have no official knowledge in the graphic area but with some improvisation and a lot of youtube-tutorials I […]

An Easier Sprint Overview

Hello. I’m part of Team Kraken as the project manager and producer of our project. We’re working on a game that used the concept of “Echo Vale of Tinea” as a starting point. In this post I will talk about what changes were implemented to allow for a better overview of our working process.
At the start of our project we were given a template in Google Sheets to use as our SCRUM board. The purpose of that was to give […]

Meet Stephen 1.0

This is Stephen. He is the main character of the game SelFish, which is a game about this little fish who gets picked on by the other fishes in the aquarium where they all reside. Eventually he’s had enough, snaps and tries to kill everyone.

As one of the graphic designers in the Team Unicorn, I designed and drew Stephen. What I wanted to convey in the design was the feeling of Stephen as the underdog, slowly traversing the boundaries of […]

Game Design 2: Designing a Cartoon like rock

By looking at several different pictures online about rocks, both cartoon rocks and actual rocks, I got a good understanding of how I wanted it all to look in the game. Although, rocks were nothing I had ever drawn before, making it a bit difficult for me to know where to start or even what to start with. Basically, I started drawing a big “blob”, in addition to later spreading it out and making it lean more towards a triangle […]

Blog 1 – Week 6

Figuring Out the Health and Death
Last week for the sprint plan I was tasked with making the enemy and player have health and when their health reached zero, they would die. It was simple enough making the enemies and player get destroyed from the scene after collision with a bullet, but having a decreasing health with each bullet that hits you was a little bit harder. I had to do a lot of research and simple planning on my own […]

Moth game: The sonar

I’m currently working on the reveal/sonar mechanic of Team Kraken’s latest moth game project. The idea is that you are a moth, and your primary means of sensing the environment is by feeling vibrations echoing off of objects around you. The vibrations come from flapping your wings, and if you flap hard enough in a certain direction (by pressing space) it will trigger the sonar. The sonar is a cone of vision stretching out in front of you. Right now […]

Creating Concept Art.

So, first things first, starting with creating concept art that would be appropriate to the given era and setting of the game.
The game document we chose, as a group, was ‘Burn Witch, Burn’ and was set in the heart of Scotland around the 16th century when witches were still at large.
For the first week, among other tasks, I took the task of creating concept art for the setting of our game. This began by researching different aspects of life at this […]