Big Game Project Week Eight

The last week of production is upon us, this weekend Gotland Game Conferance finally happens and the game will be displayed on the show floor.
Before I talk about this week I must mention what I forgot to write about last week.
The air animations for Hoppy and Sticky has been changed so that they more closely resemble slimes in their movement.


I had to work around the fact that I did not rig them to actually be able to do […]

Big Game Project Week Seven

Time to get my work to actually work in the game engine. I have never used the animator of Unity earlier so I had to spend some time learning how it works. I also had to ask for code specific for what I am doing, parameters that I can use to control the animations within the animation controller.
 

I started with Hoppy to lay down the basic movement animations idle, walk, jump and double jump since all characters share these states. […]

Big Game Project Week Six

So this week the team decided on the final name for the game: Adventures In Space And Slime. This is the logo made by your truly.
 
 

Began with a rough sketch, blocking out ideas.
 
 

Updated version that is a bit more fleshed out. We wanted slime in the logo.
 
 

After recieving feedback this is what I ended up with.
Welcome Adventures In Space And Slime!
 
 
 
 

Big Game Project Week Five

After rigging the last two characters last week it is now time to animate them as well.
 
Since all of the characters has the same basic movement I will just do the animations for the first character (Hoppy) again.
But with Glidey I have to make a few modifications since he is flat instead of round.
 

Sticky Walkcycle
 

Sticky Idle
 

Sticky jumping and landing. His stick abilitys animation looks the same as when he lands.
 
 

Glidey jump.
 

Glidey walking.
 

Glideys glide. I had concearns last week but I […]

Big Game Project Week Four

The project is moving along nicely. Though I am not particularly accustomed to the Unity animator yet I have to leave it for the time being. I have to more characters to rig before i continue.
 
The first character I wrote about was the green one know to the development team as Hoppy. The other two are Sticky and Glidey. Obviously they are all named after their respective special abilities. They can all move and jump but Hoppy can double jump, […]

Big Game Project Week Three

Finally! After creating a skeleton and a control rig it is finally time to do the most fun part. Imbuing the character with life.
 
The game engine that is used for this game is Unity and since I have little prior experience working in this engine I chose to keep the animations simple for this first step. I know that there are advanced options using a blend tree but until I have studied this I will keep to the basics.
A simple […]

Big Game Project Week Two

After last week’s skeleton placement the time has come to enable a intuitive control over said skeleton. It would be very cumbersome to be forces to animate every bone in the character by hand.
 
I used  what is called NURBS curves in Autodesk Maya to enable me to circumvent this problem and create Control objects for the skeleton rig, using tutorials online and a book I found called the art of rigging. I found this site particularly insightful: https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse460/05sp/links/Rigging/basic_character.html
While […]

Big Game Project Week One

The time has come to participate in a course where I can actually make a game and not just graphics for one. That is something I have felt is lacking the last few months.
I am working on a game that is so far called SpaceGoo Adventures. It is about three? slime creatures with different abilities traversing a world to find parts for their broken teleporterthingie. It is a 3D plattformer collectathon reminicent of old Nintendo 64 games like Mario 64 […]

2D Game Project: Things I have learned in the process

The end is nigh
 
Final week, final blog for this project. As I have stated previously the game will not really be finished. It will work but it will not really be a game. No objectives will have been implemented and the levels after the first one have practically not been worked on at all. But it is all to be expected from the first game me and my fellows. I worried that we would overscope so from the beginning I […]

A doory problem

The weeks are starting to get few and the days are starting to get long. Only two more weeks left after this one before the game is suppose to be finished. I can tell you now dear readers that it will not be finished, at least not the way it was suppose to in our head. We we need another month or two for that.
But we have learned a lot during these weeks so the next game will be better […]

2D Game Project: Stuff and things

It’s blogging time!
 
For the last week I have been on art duty and have been trying to produce a couple of art assets. But first some backstory. The world of the game I am working on, The Last Signal, is suppose to be an abandoned space ship. To be exact the game is about a science vessel traversing the final frontier gathering knowledge about other planets in hope of finding resources and easily habitable planets. But when approaching the latest […]

2D Game Project: Control Freak

New week, new adventures.
I have been promoted so to speak to Lead design for our game project The Last Signal. With this comes a whole new bunch of responsibilities. One of which is ensuring the game is as good as we can make it. And a big thing with a game are the controls.
After we had our first playtesting with a bigger crowd we got a lot of feedback on the controls of the game. Some felt that they were […]