Board Game Analysis #2 – Carcassonne

Following up the last board game analysis, here is the award-winning Carcassonne that was made by Klaus-Jürgen Wrede.
Carcassonne is a socially competitive game where you create your own playing field. Each turn you will get a piece that you can expand the map with. By using your followers the goal is to take control of territory that will grant you points towards the end game standings.
The game can be played with two to five players and is recommended for players […]

Board Game Analysis #1 – Pandemic

Pandemic from Z-man Games is a co-operative strategy game for two to four players (although due to its strategic nature of being a co-op game, you can be as many as you’d like, inc. being alone) where your goal is to save the world from four different diseases that are spreading quickly around the globe.
The game can be played by anyone from ten and up, but I would recommend someone in their older teens or young adultery due to its […]

Playground Panic #6 – More aesthetic stuff

So this week I haven’t worked on any “major” artifacts, but instead a whole bunch of minor things and bug-fixes. This unfortunately means that it gets harder and harder to make these blog-posts :/
Oh well, continuing on with the aesthetic things I talked about last week, here’s a little on how we show that a level (or day as we call it) is completed.
In our game, we have normal kids and “special” kids that you need to hurry and get […]

Playground Panic #5 – Aesthetic Stuff

Programming vs. designing. Up until recently we barely had anything that showed that the kids weren’t actually “killed off”, but rather cleaned. We have been really rushed with getting an actual “game” done and haven’t had as much time as we’d like left to spend on the fine-tuning, balancing and aesthetic feelings of the game. We don’t have much, but water-effects, UI, dirt and so on are things we either have added already or plan to add in a near […]

Playground Panic #4 – Hierarchy, optimization and control

After some discussing with our SCRUM-master Simon Wulf, we agreed on having to change our code-structure. Due to reasons (mainly time-pressure and lack of experience), we handled sprites in our GameState together with the rest of the code. It’s pretty simple to do with SFML’s built in things, but for overall optimization and to avoid clusterfuckyness in the code, it’s much better to let the objects themselves handle these kinds of things and let the GameState stay in the unknown […]

Playground Panic #3 – Ratatatatatatasplash

This week was filled with bug-fixes and different improvements in our previous assets. My main focus was spent on the View(port) and making it work smoothly with both edges and the player. Unfortunately due to a couple of meetings today, I don’t happen to have it in a completed state right now, so that will probably be on my next blog-post! Instead, I figured I would talk about how the shooting works.
The shooting, aka. the sponge-projectiles (we’re child-friendly here), are […]

Playground Panic #2 – Viewports

One of the things that makes our game unique is how you need to find and clean a kid before their parent(s) come to pick their kid up. This creates a tension that simply running around to clean the kids wouldn’t achieve, but it also required a large map and the ability to move around in it.
During the development-process so far we have only had a single-colored background. With a background added in, the game took a big visual step […]

Playground Panic #1 – Player movement

Since we’re doing a top-down shooter, we wanted 8 different directions to walk in that we used the different combinations of WASD for. We also had to make the player rotate depending on where the mouse were on the screen. SFML does this a lot easier than when we worked with SDL, especially on the input-side. We went from having a full input-class to one line basically and if we ever need more control than that we can change it […]

KreakOut #10 – mm…text…

SDL_TTF now works and the player’s score and the high score is displayed when the game is over. Memory leaks has been checked for and the only ones we had came from the text-rendering which we got fixed after some tinkering (still don’t know exactly why we got it to work the way we did, but it works now).
Final blog-post, final picture. Now time to write that report, because reasons.

EDIT: Those two blocks that have been in the same position […]

KreakOut #9 – Text? Where we’re going, we don’t need text!

Seriously, SDL_TTF is frustrating when you don’t know 100% what is going on with the rendering. Most of the day went towards trying to get that to work, so we didn’t get as much as we wanted done today. Tomorrow (Friday) might be the last day we work on this, as we don’t want to rush with the report too much.
Things we did get to work had to do with the audio, though. Sound-effects are in place and so is […]

KreakOut #8 – Next time I’ll use MP5s

Our “Random Difficulty”-setting got a little less random with the introduction of a proper spawn for the ball, on top of the paddle where it belongs. It’s still pretty random at times, though.

So, except for the minor tweaks that we keep adding (this time it was things like lives, small ball-on-paddle change and some checks on when you win/lose), we also added support for sound! And this wasn’t an easy task, easily one of the more frustrating ones so far […]

KreakOut #7 – To rage, or not to rage. That is the gameplay.

So, I guess we can actually call it a game now (and it’s pretty fun actually). Right now you got three lives until you get defeated, unless you destroy all the blocks (or close the game).
Code-wise, not much to mention. We had some problems with showing just normal sprites (since everything has been objects so far), but it worked with the older version of the function.
Next on our to-do list:

Soundmanager
User Interface
A nicer way of respawning the ball (you can die […]