Sickness and Harpoons

This week (week 6) Iwas tasked with drawing clouds and harpoons, which sounded simple enough, and would leave me with time to catch up on my animations from last week which took a bit longer than expected. It would probably have gone according to plan, had I not contracted a nasty sickness on tuesday night. This sickness included vomiting, dizzyness and constant headaches, which of course made me unable to attend group meetings but also pretty much completely unable to […]

Finding a suitable gameplay song

My goal for this week was to find a suitable background song that would be played during gameplay. The game is considered to be a children’s game, since the target group are 7 to 8 year old’s. Therefore, it is important the song communicates the right feeling to the target group. By using the MDA framework; focusing on the aesthetic goal, it was easier to find a suitable song for the game. By using MDA, I could find songs with […]

Level Design – Tutorial Through Gameplay

The game my group and I decided to develop was a game concept called Umibozu. This game has the aesthetic goal of approaching something mysterious and is set in an unknown place in the waters of Japan. The player is portrayed as a ship that sails around a thick mist with limited light to see its surrounding.
One of the vital tasks for the Alpha presentation is to make a basic level design for the game. My immediately though for this […]

Spooky Fishy

In Depth you play as a submarine trying to make your way through an underwater cave while being chased by a spooky fish (left one). As this spooky fish is kinda an important part of the game I thought it would make a good first post.
The Chasing
The creature fish thing is pretty big (image below), so trying to make him navigate through the cave seemed like a big task, so I instead decided to make him move in the background […]

Work Space

My team started making our first game during our Game Design studies at Campus Gotland. It’s a side scrolling shoot’em-up about Bees and it’s mainly for kids. The team consists of 6 members: 2 Programming minors, 2 Graphics minors, 1 Design minor and me, a Project Management minor. As a project manager I am concerned with the success of the project. The success of the project is undeniably tied to the success of the team. So really, I am interested […]

Adding music to the game

In this blog I will post about progress I’ve made in the game Omibozu. I’m making the game together with the group Flytrap.
The first thing I did for the game was to create the soundtracks. From what I’ve heard this is not a common approach, instead the soundtracks are usually created when the game is almost completed and when the aesthetics of the game is established. Because of this I had to get as much information about the game as […]

Object-spawning in a top-down shooter

My name is Guy Dimor, I’m the sole programmer (and therefore lead coder) for Team Wendigo, currently working on the game Umibozu.
The biggest challenge for me was finding the right way to spawn enemies. I needed them to come into the screen from all sides. My initial idea was for them to spawn randomly on an ellipse just outside of the game screen and then move in a straight line across the screen. A quick google search landed me an […]

Blog #1 – Scrum documentation

During my previous sprint, I have put a lot of focus and energy into writing, rearranging and organizing my group’s Scrum document to make sure that every member knew exactly was has to be done to finish the project, as well as to reduce time spent individually on browsing the backlog by each person involved in the project.
Firstly, I have gathered the group in order to collectively create a catalog of most artifacts which had to be included in the […]

Custom managers

Scripting an Audio manager
Unity have quite useful tools when it comes to managing things like audio and transitions between scenes. While these tools sure are useful, they are not always convenient. As I was about to implement sound effects in my teams current project, I decided to create my own audio manager and customize it to make sure that it was as convenient to use as possible.
The most common practice I came across when researching methods for implementing sounds were […]

Skyslug movement patterns, implementation

The Sky slug is the first enemy the player faces, but present throughout the game, including in the boss fight. In our first meeting we made a few changes to the design provided, upping their speed and giving them a melee attack, and making them more bat-like and sharp in their design. This blog post is not about the design however, but about the implementation. These creatures require a rather special movement pattern where they circle the player and attack […]

Game Design Blog #1

This weeks sprint planning for me included the enemy spawn mechanic change and the flare pick-up mechanics. The change of the spawn of the enemies was bound to happen as my older static and preplaced spawn system was criticized by the project manager and the lead programmer to being too predictable, thus making me change the old spawner this week into a random spawner which makes the game less predictable. As one of the most important aesthetic goals of the game […]

Note about concept document

As soon as development team is requested to choose the concept document for their first video game, but which is not their own concept, it raises disputable questions about level of acceptance and obedience to the concept. What does the concept document require for developers and artists? How much does the concept limit creativity? How to apply MDA framework to the concept document? Why to follow the concept document? In brief, the concept document is an essential and multi-purpose document, […]