Pixel Perfect in Unity

This week has been a adventure in Pixel Graphic Minutia behavior in Unity. I made some animations for the protagonist for our game, and wanted to test them out in Unity, to make sure everything was appearing and behaving as expected. This is when I saw it; the visual bug.
There are clear black lines of pixels showing up in certain frames of the animation. What makes it worse, is that it is inconsistent in that it doesn’t always appear on […]

Style-guide and pre-production

As many groups chose to develop the Behemoth concept, we felt pushed to do something different, add personality to it. We wanted to have a good answer for the question “What does your Behemoth game has that others don’t?”. Plot and art style depend on each other in our concept, because they were born together.

After deciding the plot and art-style, the latter being low-poly/origami with a sunset-like colour palette, the artists could focus on conveying as much as the story […]

Ray, Ray, Go Away. Come Again Some Other Day: Animating an Aether Ray

This week, I’ve been working on the animations of the ‘Aether Ray.’ I devoted the majority of my time towards the basic movement of the attacking animation where the ray fires the projectile from last week at the player. This is partly because it was more complicated than I had originally anticipated, and partially because I wanted to make sure it was ‘right.’ The ‘skeleton,’ much like our own, is the foundation upon which everything else is laid upon. If […]

Playtesting

So earlier this week (Monday 13/2) we had an Alpha playtesting workshop. Were all groups showed off to the other teams and teachers what has been made so far in the development.
During that workshop I sat as an observer to take notes and feedback about our game from the other students. What they liked about it and what they dislike and any other comments they would have.
We didn’t have a lot of sprites and mostly placeholders for the different assets. […]

Spooky tunes.

 
Last week, I decided to sit down and write some music. Umibozu, our game, is a dark and atmospheric game centred around mysteries and sea-dwelling monsters. It is also very much inspired by steampunk with gears, steam and chunky machinery through-out. So, essentially, what I was looking for was ”spooky steampunk”.
After some quick research in the field (i.e. I searched ”steampunk music” on Youtube a couple of times) I found that similar settings usually go for a Baroque or Victorian […]

The background as tool for narrative and suspense

When tailoring a game to make the player feel like a champion, you can’t just do it through a finely tuned challenged – you also need to create build-up. In Team Devourer we decided to convey feelings and mood through the use of mainly the background.
I our version we have different scenes that we use to build our narrative. These are: A sunny afternoon – used for the tutorial level.
A twilight dusk – used during the easier of our two […]

Orbiting Fishies

So last post I talked about the big fishy, so in this post I’m gonna cover the smaller, but just as important fishy, I think it’s been dubbed cave fish(y). Since I’m the programmer I won’t be talking so much about the look, but more about the movement and “AI”.
Smashing!
An Early choice I made was to have the fish very interactable and leave the door open for more gameplay dynamics, so I wanted the cave fish to be fully physics […]

When things don’t go according to plan

Welcome back! This weeks post will be about some of the issues and struggles I have experienced while coaching my team as a scrum master, and how I plan on resolving these issues. It might be a bit dry, so I apologize in advance.
The members of the project I am currently in charge of have during these past few weeks had massive issues with successfully delivering on the tasks that they had picked during our sprint planning sessions. Each sprint […]

Dev Blog #2 -The UI

This week I wanted to talk about our UI, which mainly consists of the health and aether bars.
First iteration.
When we thought about how we would design the UI we wanted to do it “portrait style”, but since the player avatar is a ship and not a person we chose to portray the bow of the ship along with its figurehead. Because we needed to do a lot of work during the last sprint and we only have one artist on […]

Project Aetherial Blog Two

Introduction
First playtesting session and ALPHA presentation is now done! The team received a lot of relevant feedback and will, to the best of our ability, try to adhere to that, as we move unto the BETA.
As mentioned in the last blog, I am the graphical artist in our team responsible for the “common” enemies. At this time, I have designed and implemented two of four enemies into our game. This weeks’ blog will handle the design and work in progress […]

Bride movement

In the game “You may kiss the bride” you want the player to feel a constant stress. To achieve this, we have a enemy – the bride – constantly chasing you as you play. If she catches the player, s/he will either take massive damage or die instantly.  Any mistake the player makes during playing will lead to the bride getting closer and closer, gradually increasing the stress for the player.
There was a problem appearing with this. If you had […]

Pre-alpha story

Hi!
This time I am going to write a story about our pre-alpha meeting with our course representatives.
“It all started on cold, winter Monday, the 5th of February 2018. The day of pre-alpha. It was meant to be the day in which they would check and remind us that we are close to the alpha stage of our project. It also meant that we should have the results of previous two-three weeks. Even though I trusted my teammates, the excitement was felted. It filled the […]