Redoing the animations before Beta…

It’s almost time for the next beta submission and everyone is barely wasting any time. Last time during the alpha presentation, few of the games were already way ahead of the others and not to mention as everyone in m group being totally new in this education without any prior experience, we were not one of them. However, the team effort was never less and thus at this beta point, we have a much better illustration of the game than […]

Blog 4

Starting Menu and GUI
Starting menus are very common elements for video games. They are so common that game designers would make these menus without justifying the necessity. In some cases, however, a traditional starting menu with different bottoms can be totally unnecessary. The menu will only break the illusion without providing any utility. Instead, a starting scene or a “safe zone” can well substitute the functionality of the game and help improve the immersion. The starting scene below made for […]

Ready, set, Scrum!

In order to keep track of our progress and make sure that we keep on schedule me and my group have been using an Agile development methodology called Scrum. The goal is to constantly work towards creating a minimum viable product, and iterating on that until the product has the features and quality desired. It is also characterized by working in small teams with short daily meetings in order to make sure that everyone knows what is going within the […]

#4 PreBeta Work: Player Feature #2

As the time before Beta Presentations draws closer and closer I find myself having to delegate my time efficiently and effectively. It doesn’t help that I recently purchased the game Celeste and played it a shit ton this week and forgoed some of my work, but I did manage to make a lot of progress this week!
Working on the Big Boi Weapon
This Week most of the coding I did revolved around our Player Big Boi Gun as well as setting […]

Level Designing the start of our game – August Demirsson

As mentioned before the game me and my group chose was Umibozu. The main mechanics in our game is to follow a terrain and kill enemies that’s in the players’ way of making it to the finish.
In order to present these mechanics to the player the start of our game is designed as an introduction to all the mechanics in a simple way. If you somehow would fail the trail you would only lose a maximum of 20 seconds progress […]

5SD064-The making of fog shape

Hi, now we come to the 4th blog in the blog journey and that means we are not far from completing the very first game in our Game Design study! This week we didn’t have any lecture from Game Design 2 but play-testing on Monday which gathered many valuable feedback to improve our game before the BETA. Today I want to talk about a small artifact from our game “Umibozu” —- fog shape.
“Fog shape” might sounds bit wired, it is […]

Lycanthrope: Sounds…

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 want talk about sounds and since I am the lead sound designer in our group this is something that I have been responsible for, making our game feel the right way and make sure that it feels like a harmonious and coherent experience.
Before working on “Beeloning” I had barely […]

Cobbling things like a carpenter – or reusing assets

As we are heading into the final sprints I’m sure we all have noticed the need for polish and just the feelings that we don’t have enough time to finish everything we want to do. Well my team definitely noticed this, and after trimming and cutting some content we were left with a list of things that needed to be done until release. Then we took that list and looked at what could be done with the help of old […]

The Tragedy of the Missing User Stories

The Beginning of the End
As the title suggests, my group is not using user stories. The reason for this horrendous act can be summed up in two parts.
First of all, the user stories that I had been given from my fellow designer were lackluster (I have no ill will towards you, it was everyone’s first attempt at user stories). The amount of stories were poor, they did not cover the entire concept document and the parts that were supposedly covered […]

Project Aetherial Blog Four

Introduction
We are rapidly approaching the BETA and a lot of things must be decided and implemented. Playtesting sessions has come and passed by, with a great many relevant comments having helped us shape our game. Aside from the game design course, we graphical artists have also had our hands full with the animations of our minor course.
For this week’s blog I will put my focus on the final “common” enemy of our game, which is the so-called sky tangler (a jellyfish). […]

Game Design – Designing the enemy’s movement pattern and behavior

Hi everyone! This week I will explain the process of the enemy movement and the design for it. As the designer of group Vampire I got the task to design the enemy’s movement pattern and behavior. The game we are developing, Umibozu, originally had 3 types of enemies in the game; a crab, a squid and a shark.
Image 1, concept art of the enemies from the concept document
Due to lack of time, we decided to only have the squid and […]

Boss behaviors in shooting game

This week I implemented the behaviors of the Boss in our game. Though we already have a draft about some basic ideas and patterns, we still encountered some detailed problem which made us to abandoned several previous thoughts.
In general, the boss is a giant fish with high health point and powerful attack. I divided boss behaviors to three parts. One is the entering state, after a player cleared the final wave of enemies the boss spawning logic triggered. It be […]