Somnium – Dream Transition

During our final course of spring 2017 at Uppsala University – Department of Game Design at Campus Gotland we’ve formed teams with about 4-7 members that will make a Game to be displayed at Gotland Game Conference at the end of the course. The restrictions for the game’s subject is a free choice but the content will only be a demo of the completed game, a vertical slice, a proof of concept. Thus, the demo will be fairly short but other […]

Week 6, Pause Function

This weeks topic might be a simple and boring one since it’s only about the pause function of our game. However, I figured there might be some solutions to how things were done that might be a tad interesting so bare with me for a bit.
A pause function is probably not necessary in such a small game like ours but it’s mainly there to not force the player to die if in need of a unplanned toilet break or just […]

week 5, Loading screen

As our game has grown larger and larger asset wise over the weeks I guess it’s not that surprising that there might be a great amount of data that needs to be loaded for the game to start. This could of course have been handled differently than we did but we chose to load every game texture as the game starts, in comparison to load everything as it is needed. This is also a viable way to do it as […]

Code Review of Team 4

The first smart thing that got me was the clean start of the player class’ update function. Specifically the way of dividing the different states into their own functions which would be called by the value of an enumerator.
I also like the way that the player class seems to have control of the player dependent objects creation such as the harpoon, the golden harpoon and fish food. This is most likely how I, myself would’ve done it to keep track […]

Week 4, Natural Disaster: Tsunami

With a game concept like Datepocalypse, where a big pile of chaos should serve as one of the main flavors of the game, some of the hardships comes in the form natural disasters and this week I’ve been working on one that we call the Tsunami. As other games may give the player a screen sweeper, to clear all enemies from the play area, this game has this “enemy” which basically does the same thing but at the same time might […]

Week 3, Player Shield

An important feature in our game, Datepocalypse, is the ability for the player to protect herself from all sources of incoming damage, be it enemies, enemy projectiles or natural disasters. Not only is it important because of the obvious fact that the enemies will try to kill the avatars but rather because controlling two avatars at once can be tough as it is. The shield would give the player some time to adjust her motor skills as well as giving […]

Week 2, GameDev Projectile Manager / Enemy Shooting

This will be somewhat of a continuation on my last blog post about projectile management in our game project Datepocalypse. However, as the earlier subject was more focused on Player feedback when shooting this section will be about our game’s projectile making structure.
Earlier most code was in handled in our TestScene (or TestGameState if you will) and was rather unorganized and cluttered with poorly chosen variables and hard to read walls of text (of code).
As the next step for our […]

Week 1, GameDev Player Shooting

In the making of my team’s space shooter project Datepocalypse I did a simple prototype of the two avatar’s shooting function. The reason for this specific artifact was mainly because it was a huge necessity for the main game play and probably also needed some time to “grow” as the game itself start to develop over time.
Starting off it was merely a matter of creating the projectiles at the avatar’s location and make them move in the desired direction. However, this resulted […]