Characters and animations – Part 2, MakeHuman and Motionbuilder

Time to continue where we left off! We have the animations, now we just need some characters to put them on.
With the time we had for this project, and the amount of characters we wanted to have in the game it seemed unrealistic to try and make the characters ourselves. Fortunately, there is a great free software we could use to ease this process for us; MakeHuman.
With this software one could design a character to ones liking (including adding some […]

Characters and animations – Part 1, Motion capture

I have been wanting to write about this subject for a while, but had not gathered my thoughts around it enough until now since there is so many things I can say about it. I finally decided to split it into two parts, starting with motion capture.
In order to make our feel more alive we needed a lot of characters in our game. The characters we needed were split into three categories; Survivors, Rescue Workers and Civilians. The survivors are the […]

Modularity – Building a city

Back to the writing! It’s been a crazy journey so far.
In this post I thought I would talk a little about working with a modular environment and how that can help the production. This is something that was comepletely new to us when the project started and that we had to work on by ourselves in order to learn the does and don’ts.
Our game takes place in parts of a bombed city, which means that a lot of buildings are […]

First week – Preparing the map

During the first week, the group mainly worked with preparing/setting up our project for the coming production. That including things as planning our map, writing up story elements for our game and doing research, which I personally took responsibility for. In this post I thought I’d mainly talk about the map.
Planning out the map
We needed a visual representation of what our map would look like. Something that we could both play around with to test our […]

First week – Research

Since our theme is quite a sensitive topic, it’s important to do plenty of research beforehand. None of us in the team had ever been in any type of war zone or anything like that in our lives, which makes it quite hard for us to put ourselves in those people’s shoes, let alone trying to do the same with our players.
Though we decided that the game would not actually take place in Syria, the situation is still heavily inspired […]

Introduction: Big game project – Sound of Life

Hello there, and welcome to this blog of mine.
Who am I you ask? My name is Malin Runsten Fredriksson and I’m studying my second year of Game Design and Graphics at Uppsala University – Campus Gotland. As part of these studies we get to come up with a game idea and produce it for Gotland Game Conference here in Visby!
This is where this blog comes into play. All throughout this project I will gather my thoughts and progress around this […]

Blog week 6 -Fixing level music

The time has come! This is officially the last blogpost for the ”Space Giraffa” project. It’s been a very educating experience, with a lot of up and downs, which I’m happy to have been a part of.
So what have I done this final week? Honestly mostly polishing. We artist tried to make sure that pretty much all the art needed were done last week so the programmers simply could implement everything this week. I guess if there’s anything I can […]

Blog week 5 – Checkpoint

It’s the final countdown!!! …Sorry that was really bad.
Joking aside, it’s only one week left until the finished product of our game is to be presented and everyone is doing their best to get the best possible result out of this project. We got a lot of good feedback both during our Beta playtesting last week and our pre Beta meeting with our teacher Marcus, which we plan to use as much as we can this final week.
One of the […]

Blog week 4 -Polish everything!

The fourth blog week has started, which means that the Beta deadline is dangerously close. There have not been many hours of sleep this week for many of our team members that’s for sure.
Since it’s the Beta deadline, that means that our game has to be feature complete! All our assets has to be done and implemented by Monday. Therefore, at the beginning of this week our entire group sat down together and went through our product backlog to make […]

Blog week 3 – Sound edit and even more asteroids

Blog week three is upon us! Our group has fought so hard these couple of weeks and as a team member I couldn’t be more proud of them.
So what have I done this week? Well since the beta is getting closer it’s been hard for us four graphics-students to create new content, since it has to be implemented in time by our programmers. Therefore, we’ve been trying to come up with stuff to draw that is not very hard to put into […]

Blog week 2 – Title screen

Another week has passed and ”Space Giraffa” is slowly progressing into a proper game. This week I have been working on the title screen for our game, specifically the interface in our title screen.

Let me explain. Basically what I’ve been trying to do is make an animation for the text in the title screen, so it will shine up or glimmer when the player presses a key to start the game. After discussing it with the other graphic students in my group we […]

Blog week 1 – Asteroid animations

My name is Malin Runsten Fredriksson and I’m currently working on a 2D space shooter project called ”Space Giraffa”. To summarize the game; it’s about a giraffe called ”Giraffa” who is kidnapped by aliens along with its family to outer space and is heavily experimented on. Luckily she manages to escape and flies towards the enormous army of aliens to find her missing family members. The game is an auto-sidescroller with enemies and obstacles coming in from the right side […]