Blog Post 4 – Level design

Level design is one of the things many people greatly underestimate. Great level design often goes under the radar since most of the time you don’t notice when its good, you only notice when its bad. Creating a level that would do our game justice was my main focus this week.
We are creating a game from the umibozu concept document and our game has a big focus on exploration. When exploration is a big part of the game, the level […]

Missing minor in digital audio design

Developing a digital game in a group of five game design students in four minors – game design, programming, graphics, and project manager, some may note that one minor is necessarily missing. In a cross-functional small team developing a game, optimally anyone can take a part as a sound designer, and contribute to the project in a best way as he or she can, although quality may vary, based on previous experience, skills, musical nature and nurture. Some student groups […]

Simple AI

Today, I am going to be talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its most simple terms. AI is the intelligence that is placed on Non-Player Characters or NPC’s. NPC’s for example, are the enemies or villagers within a game. As a programmer that is relatively new to Game programming it can be hard to implement… Continue reading Simple AI

Add a new enemy type: shooting enemy

Before the beta playtesting, I was working on adding a new enemy which can shoot at the player in our game. Before that, there were only two kinds of enemies in our game: glaucus and pufferfish, and they all behaved in a similar way. In the game they will only move to the player, not firing projectiles, which is a bit boring in a shoot’em up game.
Then our group decided to add a new enemy to our game: Sky ray. […]

Jellyfish on the Move

This week I would like to talk about the design and animation process of our second enemy, the jellyfish.
The enemy jellyfish has normal movement speed, low damage and has melee attack. It also latches onto the player avatar and slows it. I liked the idea of a jellyfish gliding in the sky because of its natural movement pattern. And thought the leg and tentacle movement would look aesthetic.
I started the design process by looking up several jellyfish types, and came […]

Game Design 2: Blogpost #4, Balancing and level-design

During the making of our game Behemoth, we found it important that we wanted the game to feel challenging but also fair. A lot of time was spent tweaking the difficulty in accordance to different people’s input about the game (you can read more about this in blog #5).
The tutorial of the game is set up to introduce the player to all the main mechanics that they will need to use in the later levels.
The first two levels of the […]