Boss design

This week I will be writing about the design of the boss in our game and how we can make a large boss that moves in an interesting way while still being easy to draw.
We wanted the boss to be huge, to stay true to the game concept. But trying to make the boss as one big sprite would make it tedious for the artists to draw and animate. That’s when i got some inspiration from one of the bosses of […]

Agileception

Scrum, or any flavor of agile development is a good tool for structuring work. But depending on the environment and tool it can vary from good to outright awful. I have experience working professionally as a software developer on large projects. When working several months or years on a larger project where you have to adapt to changes from customers, it’s a must have, to be able to keep track of rapid changes and still keeping on track.
When working professionally […]

Enemy spawners and Prefabs

Today’s post will be about the way we handle spawning enemies in Aetherial and how this system can be used to tweak and balance the game.
The camera is static in the scene and the parallax effect of the background gives the illusion of movement. By having the scene be static it becomes easier to control and design the movement of the enemies and player, since we don’t have to account for any camera movement.
Then we have a game object called […]

5SD064 – Enemy movement visualization

Today’s post is about the movement for one of the enemies in the game Aetherial, shown to the right in the image below. Enemies in traditional Shoot’ em ups tend to move in simple predetermined patterns, not taking the player’s position into account. In Aetherial, the enemies will try to move towards the player while also moving in patterns, making them hard to hit. I’m going to employ AI techniques described in the book: Programming Game AI by Example, by Mat […]