Pre-Sprint 1

What
Right before our first Sprint week, my group and I sat down and discussed how we wanted the game to be like. We already had a starting point: a well written concept document and a one page design that described in detail how the group that created it envisioned the final game.
We decided to keep the main key points of the game intact and start working on the game as soon as possible, as we didn’t want to change too […]

Designing Levels outside of an Engine

During the last couple of weeks, one of the things I’ve done is make drafts for various types of levels. As the game is still in the early stages, making these drafts has been relatively difficult. The main reason for this difficulty has been due to not knowing exactly how the enemies/objects will function. The way I dealt with this problem was by making multiple simple drafts rather than having one that is filled with detail, but would end up getting […]

9.2 Blog Entry

I’m still getting used to this blog thing, so please bear with me!
This is Stella Crawford from team Nazgul. I’m the lead artist for our project Burn Witch, Burn.
This week I didn’t have as many things on my plate as previous weeks. The work I had to do feels like a rather comfortable amount so I don’t get overwhelmed.
Anyway, what I chose to talk about is this simple idle animation for the first boss of our game, the Witch Hunter.

Top-Down attack pattern for a simple enemy

I want to write about the attack pattern/method that I implemented into our shooter. This was implemented during the second sprint week of production. The method is used by the simplest enemy we will have in the game, the farmer, who simply walks towards the player and then does a thrusting attack that deals damage to the player. This specific attack pattern won’t be used by the more complex enemy types we will add, but the method I learned for […]

Designing a Japanese folklore demon enemy

Last week I started designing a melee type demon enemy for our game. The enemy spawns to a demon realm in a 1800’s Japanese setting where the old clashes with modern. The design process was quite interesting since our graphical style tries to mimic the Japanese woodblock print which is a very flat 2d drawing style. I’ve yet to learn that style yet but here’s how the demon design process went.
I started out by researching old Japanese folklore demons and quickly […]

The First Blogpost

So today I will be talking about the powerup that we have implemented in our game because that is what I have had the most trouble with. When you press space, the witch that you are playing as will turn to blue instead of red and her fire rate will also increase by x2.
In the beginning I just made her switch animation state from her Idle to her powerup and then I also set her fire rate to […]

Oh Ja, Das Ist Structured

I, supreme leader Johannes, have made our group’s scrum document look more structured than the Third Reich. My fellow team members seem to have forgotten the common rules of writing like the peasants they are, luckily I didn’t have anything better to do so I spent several hours restoring our honour.
Colour coding, capitalization, centring and other extremely accelerating activities occupied most of my precious time. As you can see on the beautifully captured print screen, my work would make people […]

5SD037 – Transparancy

During the last two weeks our game production project has managed to proceed through the pre-production phase and entered the production phase. The pre-production phase has mostly been occupied by heavy design decisions along with the new experience of using scrum and its tools. My role as a producer for this project has brought me to be responsible for the backlog, goals, sprints and sprint reviews for this project. During the pre-production phase, I have been conducting meetings as well […]

The Design Process of selfish

As a pure design student, my main tasks in this project are to: document design decisions, take a leading part in testing the game and communicate the design to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
My intended tasks have differed greatly from what I’ve actually done. I consider this both good and bad. By having me as the designer adapting to different situations we have managed to make great progress with our game. However, this comes with a cost […]

Node Based movement of Enemies

What?
I have been working on a system for node based movement for enemies. This makes it so that an enemies path is decided by putting out Game Objects in the scene called nodes. When an enemy has two or more nodes it will then move between the nodes in sequence at a set speed.

How?
The script first makes sure that enough nodes are in the array for movement to work, otherwise it logs an error. If there are 2 or more nodes […]

Game Production Diary 1

Our project is a shoot ‘em up game. The theme of game revolves around a world of stone “trees” that have a structure of a geode; stone on the outside and a crystal hollow core. All of the creatures of the world live inside of these “trees”. And the energy of the world is in the crystals. In this game the avatar Betulla, a mix of a spider and a humanoid, climbs the inside of the tree trunk in search […]

The First post, about the second enemy.

This first post will focus a lot on our games second enemy type. The reason for this is simple: It was my focus of work this week.
Using an internal finite state machine, it’s able to maintain a very simple behaviour pattern: Move, Shoot, Repeat.
The Pseudo code that the enemy uses is as follow:
When spawned go into the “Move” state, choose an area on the playfield and move to it. Once you’ve reached the destination, go into the “Attack” state. When […]