Week 6 : Beta and the re-design of UI systems

The pre-beta playtest has come and gone, lending a number of reviews with information we were mostly already aware of. However, this was still a critical event as this confirms the need for re-designing the game in some key areas, including the very system we use to move our players and let them take actions. This blog post will thus detail the design work done before the feature freeze to come, rather than the producer side of handling the beta […]

BGP 2017 Fast Gear: Trailer

Since pretty much all of the environment and lighting/post processing had been done (except for polishing and tweaking) I could start edit together a trailer we needed of the game. This is both for our application to this years Swedish Game Awards as well as for Gotland Game Conference 2017 (GGC2017) coming up this weekend.
A couple of weeks back we started planning different shots we wanted to include as well as what kind of music and potential sound effects we wanted to use. […]

The Summoning 05

Level design and some other small things that needed to be fixed on other parts of the project.
First of all, I’m afraid to touch level design. I’m afraid of being responsible for a player not finding their way to the end or make them confused and bored. That is why I didn’t want to touch this part. But the one responsible was needed elsewhere on the project so I had to take over.
I was lucky that the level design already […]

Bachelor’s thesis

Hello everyone, it’s been a while!
I’ve spent the past month and a half writing my bachelor’s thesis. Originally I wanted to do something creative, specifically a 3D environment which I could use as part of my portfolio when looking for jobs after graduating.
However, my tutor didn’t think this idea was suitable for a thesis, so I ended up iterating my project until it became something entirely different and entirely theoretical.
I’ve written my thesis on the subject of cultural appropriation in […]

A Rat Betwixt Blog Post #4 – Additional In-Game Content

Hello, everyone!
So yes, in my last Blog Post I promised that I would show off some actual 3D coming from me! This is not me saying that rigging and skinning characters or drawing 2D turnarounds for characters isn’t 3D. In 3D projects where characters and animations are important, those things are just as necessary as making the 3D models.
However, skinning and rigging are not really the most interesting topics when it comes to 3D. In fact, they are amongst the most […]

Sound of Life Blog #3

Hello again!
Today I want to talk about vertex coloring and how I used this method in order to blend between different textures.

But what is vertex coloring?
Vertex coloring is a way of utilizing the vertices on your mesh in order to paint in an already done texture. For this blog, I am going to show how I blended between two concrete textures with vertex coloring.
I started off by making a new material and inside the material editor, I imported the diffuse […]

A Rat Betwixt Blog Post #3 – Additional 3D Work

Hello, everyone!
So, for those of you who have just now stumbled upon this blog of mine. I have been giving insight into our second year Game Design Studies finals game project, some backstory and what I have worked on for it.
So far most of my work has had a lot of do with character design and doing 2D art. Which may seem a bit off for when the project itself is for a 3D game. Well, that is just how it […]

Dynamic Camera, Joining the Game, and Reset

The work week that was 1-5 May mostly consisted of work tasks of not very big size, so I’ll detail a few, but not all, of the things I did instead of just one task per post as I did previously. One of the things i made then was a dynamic camera. It zooms in on the character that is currently doing their action. The camera zooms out to show everyone while the players plan their turns. The camera is positioned right in […]

How to animate the inanimated

Hi there!
This time I would like to share some sludge with you, dear reader. More specifically, how to make it come alive. No black magic needed though, only a shader.
To start from the beginning; the idea was that Olivia, the protagonist, was to wade across a dead field that was overflooded with a thick sludge. However, since the setting was a nightmare, the sludge needed some more umph. So I wanted it to move, like it was alive and wanting […]

A Rat Betwixt Blog Post #2 – Additional Characters

Hello again!
It’s been quite some time, but now I’m back to further give you the story of how I was involved in the creation of the game “A Rat Betwixt”!
In the last post I told you about how I first got introduced with the project, me getting accepted into the group and the work I was first assigned going into it all. In this post I will give further details on my work as well as other things going on […]

Fast Gear – Week 8

This week I have been working on sounds for the game. I would have liked to start earlier than this but other “more” important things have come in the way. I say more important but in reality sounds are very, very important for a game. I added three different car sounds to our car, one idle, one for accelerating and one for when you have reached the maximum number of gears. Every time you go up a gear the same sound […]

A lot of things have happened

Hey long time no see, a lot has happened since the last time I worte here, I managed to UV and texture all of the assets, this includes the accessories for the critter, the background objects and the interactive objects.
Because we are aiming to build our game for the android device we had to keep the file texture sizes in mind and try to minimize them as much as possible, one way we did this was to put several objects […]