Getting ready for the final test – Week 5

Hello!
I will start this post by saying that I really enjoyed playing the game at the beta presentation, the crowd laughed, applauded, everything went great.
As usual, I will show you the current state of the game:

The game is almost complete. The days that remain are for polishing this gem. I will talk about what was added, since the last post, and what I will continue working on.
There is a beautiful sound that can be heard when you’re getting close to […]

Particle effects

Right then, fifth (and final?) blog post. This week I’ve been doing mostly small fixes and balancing changes to the game as I’ve found them, leaving me with less time than I’d hoped to work on particle effects. Nevertheless I have made some progress, and learned a lot. So let’s jump into it! (Note: While the featured image is a particle effects it aint something I made. I just wanted to show what CAN be done using particle effects.)
What?
So what […]

What about a title?!

Much the same as last week, this week’s sprint consisted mainly of finishing up some small stuff here and there. A few of the bigger approaches this week were the design and creation of a title, which we had completely forgotten about, and an animated intro to provide a better explanation for the story. In this week’s blog post I am thus going to talk about multiple subjects.
The idea of the animated intro came quite late into the project, too […]

Main menu

This time I will adress how I made the initial scene with my main menu and the belonging artefacts/buttons. I had a dialogue with the designer and the other members of my team about how we thought about the look of the main menu. I then went home and made some initial sketches traditionally and then made different colour sketches and compositions for the image in Photoshop. When I was happy with the result I presented a clean and clear […]

Week 5 – Polish

This week and the week before it(and probably next week as well) I and the others in the group of Quetzalcoatl have been working on polishing our game. There are still a few things needed to be drawn, such as the third enemy and its ammo and a few animations still need to be added. But, what I was asked by my group to do until the final was to polish up the background and the sign we need for […]

Game Design 2: GUI & HUD

The last 2 weeks, I have been working on finalizing the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and HUD (Heads-Up Display) for the game my team has been working on (Shelfish). When it came to the main menu I had an idea from the start, I wanted to use wooden blanks for the button background, in addition to sticking to the design theme by making cartoonish text with still an element of humor. For the planks, I simply started sketching different types, […]

Flower Power

Very cool, amirite?
In this post I am going to talk about the patterns for shooting that the boss in our game uses. The patterns that the group came up with were spirals, cones and pulsating circles, you can see some examples of how these turned out in the GIFs below. To go along these patterns I also wanted the boss to be able to increase the complexity of the shooting the closer to death it got.



 
For the first […]

Expired Code

This week I will not be writing about exciting new features, but instead of something very serious and important: moldy code.

Forgetting to Close the Fridge
Most people are more excited about fresh food than the leftovers. I’ve been implementing features at lightning speed, but not putting any hours for code refactoring.
Always hack it in. If something works, just drop it (even if the implementation is half done). If it stops working, go back and fix it.
The Mold
A couple weeks of haxing […]

Level Design – Beta

Hello. In this post I will talk about level design, in this case specifically built for the Beta milestone and presentation. A level that was designed in such a way to showcase the game in the short amount of time we were given to present it. If you’d like to learn more about this project you can check my previous blog posts “An Easier Sprint Overview” where I talk about changes to a template that we received from […]

A moving, but readable text projectile

This week, on the game project Revenge of Teddy…
Recently, I had redesigned the previously paper planes throwing enemy into an enemy that uses laughter as it weapon to fit a new bullet pattern that was implemented. The projectile connected with the enemy had to be changed as well, from paper planes to something that signals “dangerous laughter”, so that is what I’m going to be talking about this week.
Both of my initial ideas where based around comic book sound effects, […]

Blog 5 – Week 10

Pause, Wait a Minute
Good evening, another week has passed and next week is the final version of our game. This week I worked on the pause menu along with some more sound implementation and cleaning up the main menu a bit. Though this post will focus on the pause menu and how I went about making it work. I approached this week knowing that I wanted to implement the pause menu which would display a “Restart” button, “Menu” button and […]

Baby steps in animation

Your pal Stella from Team Nazgul here once again to give you a peek into the radical world of making a video game happen.
This week we’ll take a look at my choppy first attempt at a walk loop for the Witch Hunter boss in Burn Witch, Burn.

Sprite sheet of the first key frames of the walk cycle 

I’m not a very experienced animator so from the very start I knew doing this project could be a mouthful […]