Whale, Whale, Whale – a design process

This week we’ll take a look at the design of the boss. I designed and drew everything in Photoshop CC 2017.
The antagonist and final boss of Aetherial is a whale by the name of Leviathan. Team Qilin, or rather I, chose to look away from the whole sea-monster thing and instead focus on the Moby Dick side of the game. The Moby Dick influences came from the tagline of the Concept Document; “Moby Dick of the skies”. Moby Dick was […]

Boss design

The narrative in Beelonging is that a bear is attacking the protagonist’s beehive and it needs to be saved. Naturally, the boss and the main antagonist of the game is the bear.
Setting out to design this end stage of our game, the initial idea was to have most of the bear’s body visible. This was done with a sprite depicting it standing upright on its back legs, with two additional sprites for its front legs. With this done the bear […]

Animations…Animations

Working with animations was a pretty big stepping stone for me as a person who never had any prior experience. The first time I learned about doing animations in Leo’s class, I was pretty much awed thinking about the capacity of creativity that can be flourished through Photoshop. It wasn’t easy, took me quite some time to grasp the basics. But I did, through many trials and errors and with some help from classmates. The concept game that we are […]

Flip a paper prototype to digital

To initiate works on the student shoot-em-up game project, and to open a group discussion about development, I prepared a paper prototype to specify movement mechanics and dynamics. Then I asked the team to flip the paper prototype to a digital prototype, using Unity2D and C#. The purpose of the paper prototype was to clarify the basic movement mechanics of the character in 2D Euclid space, whereas the digital prototype was requested to test the current abilities of the team […]

2. A totally new sound experience

I had more focus on the sounds for the game this week since I am the one responsible for it. I had no experience on that whatsoever so the main focus have been to learn the basics of Audacity and LMMS. The goal was to get some kind of background sound and sounds for the main character of our game. Some sounds will be recorded be me and others will be someone elses creation. The already recorded sound I found […]

Animations!

Entry Journal 2018/02/15
 
 
Today’s topic is about the animations that were made for Aetherial, the game that me and my group are developing. In this week’s sprint planning we went over the milestones that had to be reached before the Alpha Presentation deadline on Thursday, as well as the crucial requirements that the game has to fulfill in order to consider it successful, once of which was the power up ability. In the case of Aetherial, this attribute meant that the […]

Alpha presentation

During this week I have been focusing on preparing for the Alpha presentation. Being a project leader, many people expect you to be the one who are representing the game the group are creating. It is an unwritten rule; a rule you just follow. My team members did not tell me in person to be the representative of the game for the Alpha presentation. However, since this unwritten rule is circulating in the air, I felt a pressure on my […]

5SD064 – Game Design Blog 15/02

Power-up re-design
This week I focused on re-designing one of the pick-ups in our game Beelonging.
The power-up we call ”Golden Honeycomb” was originally designed to activate five seconds of invincibility after picking up three of those Golden Honeycombs. We felt that it didn’t really add anything to the game or the gameplay and therefore choose to re-design it.
In our game we have a mechanic where the Player Bee can activate and control a formation that includes all the bees in their […]

Week #2 – Setting up Git with Unity

What is Git(hub)? 
I spent a lot of time this week on our game’s Version Control System (VCS). In short, the VCS keeps track of versions of files in the game, including scripts, animations, sprite sheets, scenes etc. In collaboration with my lead programmer, Oskar Karlsson, we set up a basic Github server and provided all group members with access so that they could upload what they were working on without using a more cumbersome tool like Google Drive or […]

Scrapping the light and adjusting boat movement. – August Demirsson

As mentioned in my other blog the game we chose to make was Umibozu. In the game, you are a fisherman in search of a mystic creature in this mystical water that is surrounded by thick fog. In order to see creatures in the original game concept you had to use a light stationed on the boat and aim at the creatures to fully see them instead of blurry moving objects.
During this week design process, me and my group decided upon […]

Feedback Gathering

So last monday (02/12) we had a play-testing session class where we could test all the other teams games and give feedback. I won’t go into much detail on the playtesting and the results in and of them selves since we are to write a post with playtesting as the topic later. What I will write about is my teams approach to gathering data from testers and my task in this as lead designer.
I monitored our game during the whole play-testing […]

Same Button, Different Features

For our Alpha presentation, which is a presentation where we present to our fellow video game students and teachers the basic features of our upcoming video game, as well as the feature and movements of our player, obstacles, basic UI and potential power-ups, we needed to ensure that our main character was functioning in the same way described as a the concept document that was provided to us.
For our video game called Behemoth, which is a side-scrolling Shoot’em up game, […]