BGP Six: Playtest by conference

For the final part of production, we had the opportunity to display our game at the Gotland Game Conference. This was a great chance to see how a wide variety of people respond to the game, and to get feedback!
It was interesting to see how the gameplay experience differed wildly between different people. Some understood it really quickly and managed to make their way through our level in under ten minutes, while others struggled for perhaps half an hour before […]

BGP Five: Some UI

We decided we need another way of showing the player what’s important. The player’s objective is to collect all the bits of Leon the plushie that gets stolen at the start of the game. To show players that he is important without using words we’re making a pop up animation that plays whenever something happens to Leon.
Olivia loses Leon
I believe the fact there is a UI element for this signals to the player that Leon is important.
Olivia finds Leon’s body
When […]

BGP Four: Progress report

It’s the day of the beta (May 18th), and the jury reviewing our game decided it’s good enough for GGC! Now for tweaking and polishing until GGC starts next weekend.
This week has so far felt like a mad dash to the finish line. Unfortunately I also caught some kind of flu which leaves me working from home AND working less than I’d like. Despite all this, our lead designer and I have managed to spice up and polish our level, replacing placeholders […]

BGP Three: Some scripting.

For taking on the role of technical artist, I believe it’s essential to at least learn some coding basics. That way you can understand what’s going on behind the scenes, so to speak. This will also ease the workload of the programmers as you can create some basic scripts yourself.
In our game, we have a toy police car that needs a spinning light. This doesn’t need any external controllers or managers because it will always spin no matter what. This means […]

BGP Two: Making stuff glow.

Today I created a shader in Shader Forge for making certain player-interactable objects glow, to help set them apart from the environment.

This was the end result. And now I’ll go over the process of creating this effect. Hopefully I can make myself understood!
First of all, I don’t understand how to do everything in shaders, so the first thing i did was to try and find a tutorial. I found this picture using google. The part I’m […]

BGP ONE: exploring Unity

Hello!
This post will look back at the pre production phase of our game, where I, because I took on the roles of Lead Artist and ‘Unity guru’, started looking at what we could do with Unity.
At this point we did not have a clear idea of what our game would be, mechanics-wise. Some thematic and graphical decisions had already been made though; the game would be set in a forest dream world inside our character’s mind. The dream itself would […]

Blogging again!

Test post to check my feed is working.
Welcome back!

Blog week six: challenging the player

Hello and welcome!
For this final week I’ve almost exclusively been working on getting our design document ready for hand in. Some things needed to be defined more clearly, for example a level layout and what kind of scenarios the player would experience, to teach them how the game works and later on to challenge them. These will most likely not show up in the final version of our game, but they are part of the original vision we had and will […]

Blog week five: Fire!

This week, Simon and I have been mainly focused on rewriting our design document, not leaving a lot of time for other things. My secondary focus has been on making a bunch of different sound effects, and for this post I will go through the steps of making a flame thrower sound!
My first task was to scour the internet for free sound effects. For this particular artefact i found one wind sound on Soundbible.com that I thought would fit, after […]

Blog week four: The battleground

Hello and welcome!
So, the beta deadline for our space shooter game is just a few days away. The team is scrambling to get everything into the game. We have been a bit too ambitious and overestimated our abilites quite severely. We realized there was absolutely no way we would get everything done in time. As a result, the last few weeks has consisted of cutting things from the game. This includes enemies, levels and several planned engine features ( parallax […]

Blog Week Three: Learning to walk

Hello dear reader!
This week I gave myself the task of creating a boss character and animating it, and so I will go over the steps I took to create a walking animation.
First of all, I created a model sheet to give me some idea of what the character looks like so that I can visualize it in top view. Also, because our game is in top view, the model sheet doesn’t need to be very detailed since it will not be seen […]

Blog Week Two: Shots were fired.

So this week, in preparation for our alpha presentation, I wanted to make a few sound effects. As you may or may not know, audio feedback is a big part of making a game feel right. It turns out the sounds might not be in the game for the presentation. However, I wanted to get started early on with some sounds to avoid it being a last minute addition. This week, I will focus on the rifle sound I created.
I started by looking through […]