Students interviewed about Alt.Ctrl:GDC

Local press caught up with our students as they returned from exhibiting at Alt.Ctrl:GDC: “The place to be om man är spelutvecklare”
Posted in Publicity by Ulf Benjaminsson

5sd064 Turning the power-ups into pickup-able items

Hello again, Thomas Härdin here turning back to the power-ups of our game. As I’ve written about before I had to decide on the functionality of this games power-ups which turned out to be some fairly easily manageable enhancements to the players projectiles when playing in the hacking mode. We did get three of them, a rapid fire function that activates when 8 enemies are killed, a wider shot that you get through pressing a button, same as the wide […]

Boss Design and Implementation

Design
Because I only worked on fixing bugs this week, I decided to write about some design and coding work I had done the week before which is a lot more interesting to write about. Namely how me and our lead designer worked on the design of the boss and how I implemented it in the game.
When we designed the boss we had the following goals for it:

The boss needs to test the player’s understanding of the core mechanics of the […]

Vertex Colors

Vertex colors. It’s color data stored at vertices and you can do some pretty cool stuff with them. Most of the time you won’t have any need for vertex colors, and in unity the only shaders that make use of them are sprites, but when you’re making your own shaders you can do some pretty nifty things. Vertex colors can be used as a cheap way to shade or color meshes by combining the color with the diffuse, but a much […]

#5 “Sorry guys i need to do my homework” – Planing parallel projects.

Hi everyone!
Today i want to talk about the backlog and parallel projects.
It is common to encounter problems while working with two projects at once. At the moment we tend to structure our work so that it clashes with our ordinary school work. Handling scheduling gets difficult and our insight into our teammates situations regarding time spent on lectures, homework and other school-related activities tend to be vague at best. Many blame the schools scheduling and lack of communication for the […]

Polish and additional fixes

This week has been focused on polish. Especially when it comes to the levels and animations.
I have done some fixes to the animation, some final touches so that everything looks good for the final release.
There were some hiccups when it comes to the animations. For example, Marbles started to flap and move her legs when we put her animations into the game, the troubleshooting was a long and was a bit tedious, but when we found the problem then the […]

Moth game: Clues

What now?
Most of the mechanics in our game are finished, and we’re getting close to the final deadline. What’s left is polishing the experience of the mechanics, so that the player knows what to do and can feel a sense of progression. One particularily confusing situation players would face in our game was encountering breakable and openable branches. This was clear during beta playtesting, where we would see players bump into the branches, not aware of how to break through. […]

Playtest and Polish

Hello and welcome to this week’s blog post!
This week started out with the alpha presentation which went really well I believe, we kept it fairly short and sweet and did not recieve many questions at all which I would assume means that people understood what we are doing with the game. I saw it as a positive and I hope it was a positive! We got some feedback on the obstacles we had which we will take into consideration and […]

Blog 5

I am not sure how many people talk about the backlog, but I am going to do it now.
The backlog is an excel document that we use to track the project development. It is a tool used to track what has been done, what is being done, and what needs to be done. Items need to be prioritized and deadlines must be set. Once a week, the group and I decide on tasks that need to be done. The backlog […]

Saving, Loading, Scoring

As a last post / update on this project I’ll tell you about the very last work I have had to focus on during this past week. And that is scoring, and the ability to save and load these scores.
For anyone who hasn’t followed these post: We are currently in the process of developing a small endless shooter, which we’ve now given the name “Burn Cube Burn”. Players in this game must survive an endless onslaught of evil cubes, hellbent […]

Balancing and designing weapons

 
So this week began with our beta presentation that went really well and our game was well received by the audience.  We noticed that the different weapons had a positive effect. This is something that our group have had in mind throughout the entire production.
Our aesthetic goal and our lead word trough the project was feedback and that it feels good to play the game. And the biggest part of that is weapons and how they handle. Since shooting and […]

Guiuiui

Hey people,
today I’m going to talk about an alternative UI design I made for our game, for an assignment.
I’ll show you my process in making a interactive menu interface with a coherent artsyle. First of I wanted it to be very organic and directly implement it in the tree of the menu. I’m going to show it to you so you have a clearer idea of what I mean.
Here it is:

I liked how it looked on the tree but immediately […]