Elias Engine with UE4

This is the first blog post of several during the time I will be working on the game project Amenti at Uppsala Universitet Campus Gotland.
The previous weeks I have been working on to incorporate the Elias Software in to our game. The Elias plugin works well with having dynamic transitions in between themes and being able to corroborate an event with a musical theme. It comes very handy to be able to trigger when and where the music is supposed to be […]

Implementing A Narrative

This week has been quite a hectic one to say the least. We have mostly been iterating all of our planned assets and some have even been scrapped. Most of the menus and buttons have been reworked. One of the most essential part of our game is the narrative, which has sort of been put to the side for a long time. The general idea of how we wanted the player interact with the narrative was not necessarily through the […]

The Tutorial

For this week one of the features that I’ve been working on is the tutorial in our game. We wanted the tutorial to be one the first things that pop up on the screen when you start the game. A tutorial by definition is an instruction of how to use something, like a manual. Many tutorials in games have a visual tutorial without promptly writing “right click to fire”. If the visual representation is sufficient, there is no need for […]

Code Review of team 18

First off I’d like to compliment the programmers of Team 18 for a thorough file distribution of their header and source files. It’s easy to navigate through the files for a person who sees the code for the first time.
Looking at the player class, I noticed that it has over 600 lines of code. Browsing through I noticed that several functions that are related to the player, like the powerups, are included in the player class. To me it seems that […]

Gameplay Theme Song

For this week I have created a theme song for our game. When I first started the game I had a sort of vision for how the theme song would incorporate with the rest of the sound effects. In the beginning of our development we had some sounds for shooting that imitated an artillery firing shot. My idea was to have the sound effects of the game, like explosions and shots to mixture well with the main theme. Putting them […]

Zapdoser – the tricky one

For the moment we have five kinds of different alien enemies, and one of our more special enemies is the so called “Zapdoser”. All aliens have a fixed path designed for them with their movement patterns. From their spawn positions it’s always from point A to B. With this kind of pattern, the player could be able to predict where the so called point B will be. After several playthroughs the player can sort of “pre shoot” with a certainty of how […]

Main Theme Song

For this week I’ve created some main theme music for the game. What kind of music I wanted to have for the main theme was relatively clear. I had some keywords like “space” and “atmospheric”. The genre Ambient seemed fitting for the keywords I used, and listened to artists like Brian Eno who is a pioneer in the genre. I listened to some of his songs, that had a very slow feel and atmospheric sound. Now with this in mind […]

Alien ship – death behaviour

One of the most core elements of our game is to shoot Aliens. To avoid a simple and dull mechanic we wanted to introduce something that would require the player to think before shooting. To create this more immersive gameplay our idea was to create a form of domino effect when shooting down the aliens. When an alien is shot down, it will have a death movement pattern, or death behaviour, before it eventually explodes. This movement pattern will for […]