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 […]

Flight of the Bees

Hello again!
Fredrik here again and this week I have mostly worked on how to make the movement in our game feel better. This is because, based on the feedback we got from the alpha testing, we decided during a sprint planning meeting that the current movement we had was very lackluster. From the testers we had some people saying that our player could have been anything else and it would still have made as much sense as a bee from […]

Blog post 2: Music

Hello there.
This week I’m going to talk about the process of finding the right music for the game “Depth”.
Because the game we are creating is supposed to be a survival horror game, the music is very important for the setting. Though we cannot just take any horror music we can find. Since most of the songs we could find are very slow paced, it will not fit with the theme of “last leg”, which means “RUN!”.
For the process of trying […]

Playtesting

Playtesting – A Method of Reflection
This week we have been executing a playtest with our fellow peers in the Game Design course in hopes of getting an outside perspective on our game. As we now have an Alpha build, we wanted some insight into the controls and the user friendliness of it.
Our method was simple. We set out a computer running our game, we had one person documenting the behaviors the witnessed from the player and one person asking them […]

Lycanthrope: Spider Animation (WIP)

Hello! My name is Mattias Borgqvist and I am currently working on a shoot em up game based on the concept document “A game of beelonging” by group Ouroboros.
This week I have been continuing working on our spider enemy but this time I have been focusing on the the animation part instead of just trying to get the final looks of the spider. Now I have to make the spider move instead of just being stationary which can look quite […]