Umibozu: a post mortem

Context
For a course, I worked a few weeks on a simple shoot them up game prototype in which you played a sailor lost in a haunted and misty sea, trying to navigate the dangerous reefs and avoid the attacks of the creature dwelling under the water.
We had to design the protoptype from a concept document that outlined the core mechanics of the game and its general structure. We allowed ourselves several changes from the original concept document. We change the […]

Playtesting: a fresh pair of eyes

Context
Unfortunately, our group did not benefit too much from play test. We were late on development for the first one(but did have a bare bone prototype to show), and a large bug prevented us from showing anything worthwhile during the second one. But, we did have some people try it during the beta once the game was stable.
Motion sickness
In our initial prototype, the player was always pointing up on the screen, and rotation would result in the camera rotating to […]

Coroutines and code Hygiene

Context
As we approached the end of development I’m starting to script events into the game, most notably we needed the game to display text on the screen for narrative and informative purposes.

Displaying text, by itself, is trivial. Displaying text while not interrupting gameplay is not especially difficult. I did not however knew of a method to do it that would neither turn my code into a jumbled mess  of nested if statement or use a bunch of fiddly prefabs in […]

Scrum: Meetings, overwhelming

Context
The concept document for Umibozu seduced a lot of group, most likely because of its art style, and possibly because of the minimum perceived difficulty in making a game out of it. And while yes, none of the explicitly mentioned mechanics were hard to implement  in a basic form, their sum did not create a remotely satisfying game.
We have some liberty to adapt the concept to our vision, unfortunately, no coherent vision emerged at the onset of development and we […]

Lighting in Umibozu

Context
The game concept my team and I are developing features a cone of light that reveals elements of the game world as its core mechanic. In the original concept the cone originates from the player’s avatar and and rotate automatically and the player can toggle this spot light on and off. In addition a halo of light surrounds the player, extending over a shorter distance than the light cone. Having the light cone on also depletes the player ship’s battery, […]

Player movement in Umibozu

Context
As part of this course, my group  has to develop a 2d shoot them up derived from a concept document made another group of students.  Our game  is a top down shooter where you drive a boat in a mist shrouded sea in search of a mythical monster from Japanese folklore(named Umibozu) armed only with a light to pierce the fog and a harpoon. The stated aesthetics of the concept is to create an atmosphere of mystery and constant (moderate) […]