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https://lovliegamedesign.wordpress.com/2018/02/07/spawning-errors/
Hello Fredrik, your friendly neighborhood Fredrik here.
So if I got this correctly, you have one prefab for each spawnable, and some of theses prefabs are in turn collections of other prefabs, parented to a ghost object? Makes sense and is pretty neat, though there is an improvement for the interface. First though, your explanation that you made a ”separate script to create formations based on the position relative to the center of the formation” is unclear. If the […]

Post Mortem

And we’re done! Well technically we we’re done several months ago, but it’s nice to revisit this project at its end. I’m overall happy with my contribution to Aetherial as a coder. As a game designer however I have some reservations.
The code works, there are no major bugs and there is a clear and working way from the start to the end. The game is full of devices and artifacts I am quite proud of, such as the updated transition […]

Playtesting

At both playtests we put up two computers playing the game, each accompanied by an extra computer with a google survey on it and an observer from the group taking notes on what and how the player was doing. Anna(game design) had written a quite extensive observation sheet listing all the things to look out for in the player. Somehow though we all just started writing down our thoughts, observations and informal interviews with players on the back of the […]

Checkpoints

The game is split between several stages, each consisting of the player advancing through an autoscroller fighting minor mobs until the leviathan appears, covered in a natural armor. At this point the player hooks a harpoon into one of the whales armor plates via a small whole created by the crystals growing on the whale and rips it off. This reveals a weak spot where the player can fire it’s weapons to do damage, eventually driving away the whale and […]

Scrum

I have had some limited experience with scrum before, but in a much reduced form compared to what we are practicing here. While we did compose a backlog and hold daily stand ups, we mostly just picked a task to do and worked on it, without much further direction. The sprints were simply times at which we reviewed what had been completed so far and discussed what to prioritize for next sprint. Here however, every sprint is preceded by the […]

A scrolling sprite in unity

The powerup in the game summons a thick cloud that covers the entire screen. When this happens any enemy that is caught in the cloud loses track of the player and instead flies around randomly (technically it follows randomly moving ghost objects using its regular ai). This cloud is represented by a large sprite that moves in from the right along with the normal clouds, to represent movement in a rightward direction. Once arrived, the cloud must continue showing this […]

Skyslug movement patterns, implementation

The Sky slug is the first enemy the player faces, but present throughout the game, including in the boss fight. In our first meeting we made a few changes to the design provided, upping their speed and giving them a melee attack, and making them more bat-like and sharp in their design. This blog post is not about the design however, but about the implementation. These creatures require a rather special movement pattern where they circle the player and attack […]