Lighting for Health Revision

During the development of Four Days Before School I worked on using lighting to represent the amount of health the player had. The decision to use lighting for health was made because we had one programmer and two artists, so since we would have more man hours for graphics work, we wanted to focus on the aesthetic and atmosphere of the game and chose a concept based on that. Since the game depicted a child dreaming, the idea of using […]

Boss Design and Implementation

Design
Because I only worked on fixing bugs this week, I decided to write about some design and coding work I had done the week before which is a lot more interesting to write about. Namely how me and our lead designer worked on the design of the boss and how I implemented it in the game.
When we designed the boss we had the following goals for it:

The boss needs to test the player’s understanding of the core mechanics of the […]

Ricochet Projectile

This week I worked on, among other things, a power up which, when activated, launches a projectile which ricochets off of the sceen boundary and all enemies. It damages all enemies it collides with and stops bouncing around after a set period of time.
The design thought behind the projectile is to add power ups that encourage skillful usage of them. When an enemy drops a powerup, it drops three which all go in separate directions.
(The image above shows the three […]

Spinning Enemy

This week I worked on adding more enemies to the game, as we previously only had a single one. I made 4 new enemies but the one I want to focus on for this blog post is an enemy that in the concept document was called ”Squirt.” Squirt is an enemy that circles around while spinning around shooting bubbles to the left and right. Here’s what he was depicted as in the concept document:

Spinning and shooting quickly creates waves of […]

Tether System

This week I worked on a ”tether system” between a teddy bear that is controlled with the mouse and a girl that is controlled with the WASD keys. The goal of the tether system is to render a tether between the two characters to visualize their connection to each other.
The reason why we decided on having a tether between them is because of feedback from the playtest. Our testers didn’t understand why the teddy bear is shooting a projectile towards […]

Revenge of Teddy – Group Troll – HP Light Test

Today I worked on a system which should use light in the level to show the player’s HP. For now I’m using a point light in unity which changes in intensity and range as the player’s health changes. This first image shows what the screen looks like when the player has full HP:

(The white box is a placeholder for a teddy bear that the player controls in addition to the main character. Th grey box is a placeholder for a […]