Post-GGC

So, this ride was amazing, and it feels a bit sad that the development course is over. Don’t think I have been this bummed out about summer soon being here… Anyway.
What are the future plans for Anchored and were will we go from here?
A lot of people have been approaching us and have asked us for a copy of the GGC build. I feel honored by this. All I’ve wanted since starting developing games is to create games that people (and […]

GGC

Last weekend we exhibited Anchored at the Gotland Game Conference, and it was a lot of fun. A lot of people played Anchored and we got lots of great feedback and input from a lot of people who played the game. Simply by observing people play provided really useful feedback.
We did find a game breaking bug in the GGC build, which was tied to the tutorial. During the tutorial the player is asked to construct a building. If the player […]

Pre GGC!

Pre GGC
This week has been the last week of production for the team and also the last week before the Swedish Game Awards turning deadline, which was yesterday Friday, and before Gotland Game Conference which is today Saturday. Depending on how the game is received at GGC we might continue to work on it in the future, which is exciting.
Yesterday was an interesting and stressful day. The hours just disappeared. The SGA turn in went well, no problems with submitting […]

Day& Night Cycle

It’s been almost three weeks since i wrote something on this blog. Time flies by fast. So we’ve gone through some iterations of the concept of the game during this time. Design wise we shifted focus from the jungle to the island about two weeks ago. In the current version of the game the player gathers supplies form the jungle at day, and at night she needs to defend the island form insects that come to steal the settlers’ food. […]

Basics of combat with a bear

Last week I promised to write about the combat system in our game, and as promised here it is. The player commands the settlers to attack an enemy and then the settlers and the enemy fight, similar to how it’s done in RTS games. In our case the enemy is a jungle bear.
Ingame picture of one of our enemies in our game. The jungle bear, modeled, textured and animated by Nisse Lindblom.
 
The bear has different two attacks, one bite attack […]

Start of BGP

Big Game Project
Last week we started working on our game for the Big game project course and boy have I been waitin for this course all year long. I am really excited about the upcoming weeks and it feels good working full time on a game project again.
The game is a survival game with real time strategy like elements in it. You control a group of settlers that have decided to build their homes on an island floating above a […]

Tutorial

This week I’ve been implementing the tutorial for our game Trespawsser, and for change I’m going to focus on the design aspect rather than the coding aspect of this artifact, however I will briefly touch on the code as well.
The tutorial is pretty standard, and nothing I am particularly proud of, and I will come back to why that is later.
The tutorial is built in the main level, so there is no external “training area”. This is because we wanted […]

Doors and keys

The past few day I’ve been working on fixing the doors and the keys in our space shooter. One of my programing colleges, Andreas Lundmark (link to his blog here), had been working on the base of both the doors and the keys, however since he got stuck with the coding and had to work on other parts of the game, such as sound and the menu of the game, I decided to take a look the […]

Animations

This week I’ve been working on the animations for our game, and since I’m coding in SFML it is in theroty pretty simple to implement animations, however I wanted to do it in a object oriented manner which made things a bit harder when trying to figure out a solution. Cred to this guy: (  https://github.com/LaurentGomila/SFML/wiki/Source:-AnimatedSprite ), since I used his code as a starting point, however I believe my code looks and functions a bit different than […]

The Heads Up Display, early stage [WIP]

So this past week I’ve been working on the Heads Up Display, the HUD for our space shooter project Fancy Mansion. Well, the name is about to change to something else once we come up with a fitting name.
I went through some iterations when working on this task, since I couldn’t really decide on one solution over the other in the beginning until I remembered what a second year student told me about RenderTextures.
Now, remember, at the moment, all […]

The boomerang

A brief explanation:
So in our game, you play as a burglar in a big, badly lit mansion, and the only source of light you have is a glow stick that act as a boomerang, which of course means that the player can throw this to light up a distant area. As any good boomerang, it always returns to the thrower.
The player throws the boomerang using the right mouse button. It flies towards the courser and returns to the player when […]

The tile map

I’ve been working on the tile map for our space shooter game. Each and every tile have a different texture and sound when the avatar walks over them, some tiles have collision vs some entities, the avatar, the projectiles and the enemy amongst others.
We did not want to hard code the entire map, since this would be time consuming and a pain when needing to create and make changes to the map. Instead the tile map creation that reads from […]