Moth game: Improving the sonar with procedural mesh generation

This week we had our first playtest. Among the feedback we received, there was this idea of having the sonar bounce or stop when it collided with obstacles. This would make sense, since that’s usually how sonars work in the real world, but also because of how it impacts the gameplay. If the sonar can be used to see through everything, there won’t be as many options for how to build in surprises in a level. Blocking the sonar opens […]

The Moray Eel boss

This past week me and my team have been discussing the possible implementation of a boss in our game (SelFish). As of yet, it’s not final that we will have this boss in our finished product. However, we felt that it is important to include a designed concept with the core mechanics needed before the feature freeze coming up next week. So therefore, I’ve mainly been focusing on this boss this sprint.
The team decided on a moray eel as the […]

Ammo UI (Coding) – Week 2

Last week, i accepted the task of making the ammo UI for our game. While i thought the task would be relatively simple, i was proven wrong when i actually began the work on it. While the task seems simple enough, i also had to go through the code written by my fellow teamates, which required a significant amount of time. That time of course, was spent to understand the code already written and further on used for the aforementioned task. […]

Backgrounds and parallax

During this last week I’ve been mostly working on the background and its related components. At first I had to make a single static image to be panned across the screen as an initial version of the background. This was done to avoid presenting a blank background last week which would have made the game look more unfinished than it was. However, I didn’t make that version without any thought put into it. It was done in photoshop (like all […]

Alpha, Conveying controls #5SD037

 
Game state: Alpha
Today we had our Alpha presentation, it went…Not super good, but acceptable.
There is a lot of things lacking in our game. As a designer I have failed to convey simple mechanic to the player. At least in our alpha version.
We have a crow circling the player. It is an indicator for how long the player can teleport, and it also has a glow to indicate when the players power up is ready. At our alpha demonstration we got […]

Game Development Update #2

Well, hello there!
Welcome back for another peek into the splendid game called Samsara. For all of you out there who just jumped aboard and have no clue what this is all about, please have a look at the previous post called “Game Development Update #1″.
*geee* I’m so excited, Ted! Tell me ASAP what you’ve been up to this week!
Hold your horses, I’ll get right to it! This week I play tested the game and experimented with the overall level design. As of […]

A vicious flower

For this post I choose to focus on the designing and drawing I made this week of one of the enemies for our game. We have decided that besides the usual dangers that lurk in the world of an insect we should also have a flower that can shoot projectiles at our protagonist, and since the programers need to integrate the animation into the game it was time to create it now.
The flower is supposed to be an enemy, so […]

Preparing for the End of the Alpha Phase

This week marked the end of the alpha phase of the project. As a result, I haven’t been focusing on any single design task, but more on designing a level that demonstrates our work on the project so far and I’ve also been helping out with implementing assets.
On Monday there was a playtest session, where every team could show their game and let other teams play them and give feedback. This was really helpful, because it turned out that no one really found […]

A blog: Part 2 – Blog? Blog.

5SD064
This week has been a busy one, the entire team was working really hard to make everything ready for the alpha playtest and the presentation. One of the things that i have been working on now that my alpha work was complete, is animations for the enemy characters. The enemy that has the most fleshed out graphics is the one we call the rifleman. He carries a rifle, and is the ranged enemy that the player encounters throughout the game. […]

Animating a projectile

This week I have been working on a wide variety of assets for our game, but the artefact that I have chosen to write about for this week is the standard projectile I designed and animated. This projectile was produced during previous weeks, but it did take some time for me to finally get it right. I drew and animated the projectile in Photoshop using my Wacom Intuos Pro.
So, as the main character’s power is fire, it would only seem […]

Weapon Upgrades

Last week we began discussing having various weapons in our game, so we decided to have them as a sort of “Temporary” upgrade. Currently the player starts with just a pistol. It has a medium fire rate, basic 1 shot pattern and the projectiles move at a somewhat normal pace. On top of this, since it is the starter weapon, it has infinite ammo as well.
Marcus mentioned something that was already on my mind, which was that we should have […]

Creating graphics

During this past week, I have been helping out with the artwork for our game. The reason I did this, despite having the role of producer, was to take some of the work of the shoulders of the graphic artists in the team. They currently have a lot of tasks on their plate right now, and we may be in over our heads with our initial ambitions. The main reason behind this is that the art does not really keep […]