Blog post #2 Monster approach sound

!Link to the music clip at the end!
Team Cockatrice is building a Japanese mythology inspired game. In this game, you as the player traverse a foggy sea while mythical monsters try to get in your way. Even though there are enemies, the game is more about the feeling of threat and the sense of adventure without actually being in danger. So how do you design sound for these monsters?
This week I made several sound effect clips, amongst them were the […]

Fog and Darkness system

Hello, I am Hampus Bergström, the game designer for the team Wendigo that works on the game Umibōzu. This week I have been redesigning how the fog system works within our game to help us in the team to solve the problem of creating levels and a sense of progression within our game. As our game is a vertically scrolling game that takes place on the open ocean and with randomly spawned enemies we had a hard time solving this […]

Game Design journal 2

Mikael Ferroukhi                                                                                                                            date: 15/02/18
5SD064
During this second week, I have so far been mainly working on tasks related to my Graphic Minor, while slowing down on my “team related” work. This means that instead of drawing placeholders and art in general, I have preferred to focus on an Art assignment that is due for the next week.
I decided to go in this direction because the assignment consist of drawing two different animation for a character of my choice. The thing is […]

Creating A Relatively Easy Enemy From A Mechanical/Dynamic/Aesthetic View

Today I will blog a bit about what we are calling The Pufferfish

How did we design a relatively easy enemy?
This is The Pufferfish, it is supposed to be one of the easiest enemies in the game. We wanted to create an original enemy as opposed to what was written in the original concept document.We chose to do this because we felt that the original design lacked a sense of mechanics, or rather too complicated mechanics. But also […]

The Design and Code of Aetherial’s Harpoon

As I have mentioned in my previous blog post, we wanted the Harpoon to be more versatile than it was supposed to be in the original concept document. Instead of being the weapon of choice for the player we decided to make it slow firing, but deal a lot of damage. This way the player still wanted to use it in certain situations, but since the harpoon also couldn’t be aimed he would have to use the beam attack to […]

2018.02.15 – Enemy follow/move towards Player in a 2D Environment (NOT Pathfinding!)

Topic: How to create a basic “chasing” A.I. (i.e. stupid zombie like )
Why this is NOT pathfinding!
Simply put pathfinding implies obstacle avoidance, which this method doesn’t do. In other words, using the method described below, your enemies will be running head first into obstacles and do so until they are killed or they are destroyed.
Why it is a working placeholder solution for our game?
Considering the enemies in this game are wedding-attendees who transformed into zombie-like demons, the player expects […]

the role of a Lead Artist

Hiiiiiiiiiiii!
Today I would like to discuss the role of a Lead Artist (from here on referred to as LA) as I have implemented it during my work with Depth.
Our group (Ettin) has two graphic designers (blessed), so it was not a clear choice who should take on the role as LA. Since there were only one of each other minor in the team, we reasoned that the ”extra” artist would be Lead Sound Designer. Truthfully, I don’t recall exactly what […]

Lighting effects in Unity

I’m Guy Dimor, lead coder for team Wendigo, and today I’ll write about my journey into the wonderful world of lighting, Unity, and the combination thereof.
After the alpha playtests, my group decided that our immediate priorities are the implementation of the ‘fog mechanic’, concealing the true nature of game objects, and lighting effects, to add to the atmosphere of the game and greatly enhance the player’s experience.
Once I was done with the aforementioned fog mechanic, which involved using sprite masks […]

Making some sound

For this week, I have been working on the background soundtrack for Umibozu. Since the game we are aiming to create is supposed to be uncomfortable and mysterious, music wasn’t necessarily something we wanted. Instead I decided to try and keep the soundtrack somewhat ambient, with the odd uptick in certain sounds. I encountered some issues with saving the project in Audacity (the music editor I use). Eventually I managed to fix it, but this took up a significant amount […]

Powering up the Power up – Blog post 2: 20180215

So – this week is Alpha week – and my post will describe my reasoning concerning the detailed design of the power up.
The game that we are creating in my team is named “Aetherial” in the original concept document and the main objective for you as a player is to hunt and kill the big whale. Like a Moby Dick story in the sky you could say.
Early in this course, on the very first design meeting I called for, we […]

The main menu as a narrative tool

Friendship Down’s original concept document provides basic narrative direction: while on a peaceful mission, the crew of the spacefaring vessel The Friendship is abruptly attacked by a hostile alien race. The crew (a squad of friends) is forced to abandon their ship using escape pods, and then land on an unfamiliar world where they must fend off their attackers and find a means of escaping the planet. This basic storyline was intended to be communicated through an introductory cutscene, showing […]

Second Post: Mist and UI

I want to do some things that I do not feel I did properly last time. First, I wish to introduce myself, my team, and the project we are working on in more detail.
My name is Adam Olsson, I study game design and programming at Uppsala university campus Gotland. I am currently, together with my team called team Zombie, in the middle of an assignment to make a simple shoot’em up based on a concept document that was written by […]