More Bees, Less Bugs

Even though we are creating a game about bees, wasps and beetles, I only want bugs to appear on screen and not in my code. Unfortunately, fixing bugs is a major part of your work as a programmer and can get extremely frustrating when you can not seem to find out what is wrong.Especially after the last playtesting session there were a lot of things that needed to be fixed. For some reason, our main character or his companions occasionally […]

2018.03.01 – Maximizing your Audio budget using pitch variation

Why do we need sound?
In order to help the player enter into the magic circle, we need to consider all aspects of the game feel such as movement, visual cues, and audio feedback. Today we will be tackling the last one.
Audio helps us conveying information to the player by engaging another sense besides visual and tactile (e.g. rumble). Relaying feedback via audio, allows us to:

further immerse the player by making sure all possible sense are engaged in the universe we […]

Smoke and Mirrors

Welcome back!
Fredrik here again, and this time I will bring you a peek into the design process of the AI in my game. As the title suggests, AI is usually not what you’d think when you experience it as the player. For instance, in our game, we struggled a lot with the AI even though it’s part of the core mechanics of the game. The AI is supposed to be what achieves the aesthetic of belonging in our game. You […]

Animation cycles

Hiiiiiii!
This week I am going to write about last weeks art assignment (as I imagine many Graphics minors are). We were supposed to create at least two animation cycles of the same character, and we were encouraged to pick a character from our shoot ‘em up. Surprisingly enough, I ended up animating my beloved pink Fish (!!!!). I decided to make a death animation, idle animation and a turn-around animation.
I started with the turn-around, because I figured it would be […]

Comment on Blog Post #1

Hey duder!
Good blog! Very descriptive. I like how you explain what you were going for when doing the animation of your character, it’s helpful to know – seeing how I have a hard time animating myself. One thing you could think about though is adding more pictures! I didn’t in my blog post either, and looking at other people’s blog posts makes it apparent that it’s more informative if you do!
It would be a more interesting blog post if you […]

Comment on Blog Post #2

Hey!
Good blog, dude. I really found it interesting to gain some insight, as a graphical student, into the programming process – and I really appreciate the detail you went into, without using too much programming-jargon that I wouldn’t likely understand! It helps me in understanding how I can make things easier for my own programmer in the future.
If I had to pick on something, though – it’s that I would like to see more ways in which us graphical students […]

How to use the Animation tools in Unity

This week we were a little short on manpower since one of the members on the team is on vacation. My tasks were more focused on importing and implementing done assets into unity as well as doing animations using the animator, instead of making assets as I usually do. Thank goodness for Scrum am I right?
So here’s a workflow instructional guide on how to import sprites into unity.
The Basics

Drag and drop all your sprite sheets into the Unity folder of […]

01-03-2018

This Monday we had our first playtest since the Alpha preview. This blog post will be about lessons I learned from the feedback my group got from that testing.
At first, some of the feedback we got was quite confusing, and some downright offended me as the programmer. People were writing that the attacks didn’t work and that enemies were invincible. And I knew that just wasn’t true! But why were so many people saying the same thing? The answer came […]

4th post – pressure before the Beta presentation

Beta presentation is coming up next week. By then we have to be finished with core features, movement, attacks, UI, and challenges. It is a tough week and we have felt quite a lot of pressure recently. Things does not always go as we want them to go. The harsh winter weather caused problems, because many people got sick, and so did some members in our team. We had some delays and it seems that we are running out of […]

Enemie Polish

Hello everyone. I have been working on and polishing the enemies in our game. In particular the Dragonfly, Spider, and the Wasp. First up was the Dragonfly. We wanted to clean the enemies as they play an essential role in our game and because what we had was mainly placeholder enemies so we could focus on more critical issues we had.
I modified the pattern to how it moved so it would be more erratic. More specifically I made so it […]

More than One Sprite

From struggling with one of the most difficult obstacles that I have encountered in programming so far,  I have now finally learned how to design a formation of enemies in my video game, that can also be called upon to attack our player. Very exciting indeed, and because of this, the main design and programming of one of our enemies, which is also the main attack called upon from one of our other enemies, is finally completed, and another Scrum-goal […]

One-page document

Hello, I am Hampus Bergström, the game designer for the team Wendigo that works on the game Umibōzu. For the last few weeks I have created and updated a one-page document for the team. The document contains explanations and images of every feature and asset in the main game mode of the game that is currently implemented in our development build or are soon to be implemented.
As we progressed further into development I noticed that not everyone could keep up […]