Tether System

This week I worked on a ”tether system” between a teddy bear that is controlled with the mouse and a girl that is controlled with the WASD keys. The goal of the tether system is to render a tether between the two characters to visualize their connection to each other.
The reason why we decided on having a tether between them is because of feedback from the playtest. Our testers didn’t understand why the teddy bear is shooting a projectile towards […]

Animating a farmer

In this week’s post, I want to talk about an animation I made for “Burn Witch Burn” about two weeks ago (more info on the game in last week’s post and probably coming ones).
For my first two animation cycles and their respective sprite-sheets, I opted to focus on the farmer-type enemy first, as they are the most prevalent enemies. Me being the only one in the graphics department of my team, I must focus on the most quintessential graphical elements […]

Post #2 – Swordfish

This week in graphics for my team’s game Selfish I decided to provide additional art for one of the enemies. Joel my team’s game designer had designed an enemy that would charge forward and follow the player. I sat down and brainstormed some ideas of various types of fishes that could fulfill this role. Without a doubt I thought of the swordfish, famous for its long sharp like beak for a mouth, the fish would portray perfectly the actions that […]

Enemy – Frog

After working on the hornet-like ”Hunter” enemy last week, I was tasked with designing another enemy. This time, it was a frog.
I have actually always liked frogs, so I had fun designing and drawing the asset.
Since we are going for quite a fantasy-like world, with a lot of non-realistic color schemes and patterns, I had basically free reign when deciding what it should look like.
Since our game is very dark, I wanted to make sure that the frog would easily […]

Our enemies

Hi, this is one my second blog post, the first one after the alpha presentation and playtesting. I’m gonna talk about one of our base mechanics, the enemies.
In the concept that we are currently working on (Burn witch burn) the main character gets chased by the “mob” an unkillable horde of angry farmers that hunts yo through out the first level. While trying to run away from this unkillable mob, the player will encounter other obstacles and enemies. This enemies […]

Figuring Out the Scope

Hello dear reader and welcome to my second blog post!
One of our main concerns when it comes to our project is figuring out the scope. We simply do not know how much time certain things will take to make and implement and we can therefore not plan very far ahead. We obviously try to do that anyways, but due to our inexperience in projects like these we tend to overestimate how many things we can actually put in the game.
This […]

Week 4

 
This week has been somewhat of a turning point for my group since we feel like we actually have an idea of what the end goal of our game is, for the first time since the start of the project. The alfa prototype is done and now it is time to iterate further and polish everything to the nines! One of my tasks has been to create art for one of the enemies in the game, a mean worm. It […]

Navigating through the darkness

Our game is a very dark one, therefore its important that the player have some means of navigation. In the original concept document, the player was supposed to use some sort of coneshaped sonar fireing strait ahead, but I felt like that might not be engough, at least not for the more open world labyrinth we had in mind. Like for instant, an enemy could sneak up behind you and kill you without you knowing what hit you.
Instead me and […]

Visual Feedback

We are nearing the end of the fifth week of this project. This week we had our first playtesting session and the Alpha presentation. From the playtest we got a lot of useful tips and comments, but one thing that almost everyone commented on is the lack of feedback for the player, enemy and destructible objects taking damage. So I implemented the feedback before we had the Alpha presentation.
First I did a pretty simple feedback for the player taking damage. […]

16/2 review

During this weeks production i have among other things begun the work process of creating decorative assets for our in game environment, specifically two rudimentary models of underwater plants to spice up the game’s visuals. As of the time of writing my team’s game only has a very rudimentary background which is little more than a few colors mixed together to create a temporary image to set the mood of the game rather than represent what will actually be there. […]

Testing the Teleport

Extending last week’s post, the teleport is being developed further in our 2D shoot ’em up game.
First, the implementation of the teleport was fixed. Unity’s rotation axes don’t use the Cartesian Axes reference point, but starts on the positive y axis instead. The teleport now uses basic trigonometry to calculate the radius from the player and confines it to the maximum radius, set in the inspector.
We had also begun playtesting the teleport. The lack of any indication of the maximum […]

Visualizing player health without a HUD

In this weeks blog I would like to write about the task of trying to present the health of the players health without using a HUD.

Realize you don’t want a HUD
Brainstorm ideas on how to make something visible without it
???
Profit

The original plan for our project was to make a bullet hell-esque game. Because of this we felt that it would be necessary to show the amount of available lives  directly on the players avatar to not divert the players focus.
Since the […]