The week before Gotland Game Conference

The following is a list of what I did the week before Gotland Game Conference (GGC), and for a bit during GGC.

I made it so every character in the game starts facing a random direction. It would be better if the characters instead faced a direction that made best sense, but it’s a fast and easy solution, and it’s better than that every character starts facing the same direction.
I finished the system for saving network messages that are not ready to be […]

Meeting

On Monday, two weeks ago, the week before the Gotland Game Conference, we started the day by having a meeting about the design of the game, the UI design, and the graphics. The talk about graphics was about scaling down the scope and prioritizing, and I didn’t partake in that discussion as I’m not one of the graphical artists. The game design didn’t feel good enough and fun enough, and the UI didn’t feel intuitive and easy to use. A few of the […]

Dynamic Camera, Joining the Game, and Reset

The work week that was 1-5 May mostly consisted of work tasks of not very big size, so I’ll detail a few, but not all, of the things I did instead of just one task per post as I did previously. One of the things i made then was a dynamic camera. It zooms in on the character that is currently doing their action. The camera zooms out to show everyone while the players plan their turns. The camera is positioned right in […]

Commands, attacking and blocking

I have this week, four or five weeks since the start of the course, among other things been making the players attacks and blocks. I also made the player attacks and blocks we had in the prototype. We had all of them sort of working in the prototype except the fire attack. We have now just hade Alpha and have pretty much everything at least almost implemented. The attacks and blocks are:

A horizontal slash in front of the player character. […]

Spawning and entities

One of the things I’ve made this week, week 3 or 4, is to have the data about characters and entities be loaded from files, and to able to be placed in the tilemap editor. It’s otherwise been mostly small fixes and et cetera. These are some of the things which wasn’t implemented in the prototype, except for the tilemap editor. The placing where the entities appear are called spawns, which they usually are called in games. The spawn data about what […]

Prototype and Networking

Introduction
In the current course we are to make a ‘vertical slice’ of a game. We are 7 people in my group; 4 are graphical artists, and 3 are programmers. 1 of the artists are is the lead designer, and 1 of the programmers is the producer. The producer has so far not made any of the code, so I and the other programmer have made the code we have produced so far.
The Game
 The game is called “A Rat […]

Cogwheel Main Menu

Hello and welcome to the last of the blog posts of our Planet Suburbia game. The game is nearing its finish, and tomorrow it has to be done. There has been a lot that have had to be done, but I feel like it’ll turn out pretty good.
One of the things I’ve done this week is to implement our new main menu screen. I’ve spent a number of hours on it today and yesterday, as there are a number of […]

Sector Unlock Rotation

I think that it usually doesn’t take very long for me to implement something when I program. Most of the time it takes less than an hour, sometimes it takes two, three less often, four not very often, and five is quite rare. I’ve worked on it for over four hours on it today without success, so I’m a bit tired of it.
The player can rotate around the planet to the four sectors of the planet using the ‘A’ and […]

Code Review

This is a code review of Potato Pirates made by group 18. Most of the design changes I’m going to suggest that could have been made are things that could be good to keep in mind for future projects, but some of these might just add unnecessary workload to implement right now for their project, as it’s relatively near the end. Some of these changes would mean a bit more code that would be put in managers in the beginning, […]

Power up pick up

One of the things that I have done this week is that I have made it so that the power up icon, which some enemies drop when hit, moves from the position of the hit enemy towards the HUD when clicked. This icon will then sit next to the ‘Spacebar to launch’ on the HUD as can be seen on the image above (The yellow thing is the power up icon). It’s movement is done by using lerp (linear interpolation) […]

Gravity Propulsion Bomb

One of the things I did this week was to program our new power up. I came up with it during last week. It’s called GPB (Gravity Propulsion Bomb). It replaces our older power up; Meteor Shower. The GPB is shot from the player’s cannon and explodes in the sky. It then becomes looks like a black hole and behves like a magnet that pulls in and sucks up all the nearby enemies. One of the alien ship types will […]

Health Meter

This week I’m going to talk about the health meter. I fixed it so it works correctly and is completely functional this Monday night, but I had begun working on it a bit the week before but didn’t finish it. I also added a wave effect on it on Thursday. The health meter behaves like a bowl of water. For example, when the health meter is full it’s completely round and green, but when you have only half of your health […]