BGP Week 8 – UI Switching

The final real ‘feature’ added by me before we changed focus entirely to solving bugs and polishing details before Gotland Game Conference was a change in the UI. As the game features three characters that the player switches between, using the right and left trigger buttons on the controller.
For this reason, above the button images that were added last time, which were of the triggers, we wanted pictures to tell which slime you would shift to by pressing that button. […]

BGP Week 7 – UI basics

As Gotland Game Conference got closer, we realized we needed at least a simple UI, and as such I took on the work to put that in. While the work was not that overwhelming, I was new to working with the Canvas layer of Unity, and as such had to learn as I worked.
The first step was quite easy, add some images into the screen. This was simply implanted using the Raw Image template, which for someone inexperienced seemed the […]

BGP Week 6 – Puff and Cutting it

For most of this week, I worked on another new platforming challenge, the puff shroom. The concept was quite simple: If the player stood close to it, after a set time limit it would explode and fire the player away from it. The design idea was for it to be used both to get the player away from locations or down from ledges if they were too slow, but also as a short-cut for those skilled enough to utilize the […]

BGP Week 5 – Calibrating Rotations

While the rotating shroom was something I started on some weeks before, this was the week when the final issues were fixed up as the final version would work, and as such this seems like a good time to explain how it works.
While not massively complex, the curse of this platform that took time is that for rotation, Unity relies on quaternions, which is not exactly the easiest to understand. However, eventually I realized all that was needed was a relatively […]

BGP Week 4 – Collectibles

While it did not take up much time, the most noticeable thing I worked with during the fourth week was our collectibles. Specifically, the scripts needed for them to be picked up and for the result to be recorded.
The first part was to create a script that would receive the information. This was made out of two integers representing small and large collectibles, and two functions that when called would increase the designated integer. So it the pickup for a […]

BGP Week 3 – Shrivel Shrooms

During the third week, I worked on the shrivel shroom, a relatively simple concept. The idea was for it to be a platform that would shrink whenever a player stepped on it, shriveling in to the center point.
This was relatively easy to make the basics for, simply setting up a a function that turned a bool true if a player collided with the platform, and false if they jumped off, and then have the shroom shrink by a variable amount […]

BGP Week 2 – Venus Slimetrap

During the second week, I started on the game’s main challenges, the special platforms that the player has to work with or around to move ahead in the game. The first one I ended up finishing up was the Venus Slimetrap, a platform inspired by the infamous Venus flytrap plant.
The Venus shroom is a simple construction, working by detecting if the player collides with it, and if so triggering a bool that starts a count taking in deltaTime. Once it reaches […]

BGP Week 1 – Camera Angles

It seems proper to start with an introduction. This blog post, and the ones that will follow it are on the subject of the Big Game Project course at Uppsala University Campus Gotland where I, as part of a group of six people, will be working on developing a game. The game I will be working on has started out with the project name Spacegoo Adventures, and is a 3D puzzle platformer.
The first week I started out working on getting […]

The Menu

This is the final week with a blog post from this course, and as the projects wraps up I believe it is only fair to talk about one of the features we waited the longest with completing, so today we will talk about the menu and the process behind creating it.
The reason this was something we waited so long with is that we wrote it off as relatively simple and not requiring any special expertise, and thus our time seemed […]

Oxygen Bar and Flare Count

The past week I decided to focus on the player’s HUD (Heads-Up Display) which is key to displaying information to the player, something which has proven itself an issue as we tested the game. Being unaware of their ammunition’s limit has repeatedly caused players waste away shots, something I believe will be resolved when there is and easy and clear visual display of their ammunition.
The HUD also contains several bubbles with represents the player’s current oxygen. The oxygen slowly decreases […]

Thor and Sprite Animations

Most of this week has for my part been taken up by getting the Thor library extension for SFML to work properly. Thor is made to provide options for 2D animation with SFML, allowing sprites to be animated. While it took quite some time to figure out, once I got it to work the process Thor uses is easy to replicate. Even so, installing the library was a confusing mess and the online instructions were more or less awful. In the […]

Ammunition Crates

This week has been a fair bit of work under the hood, preparing new things and setting up stuff for a later date. Given this there haven’t been much made to show. Thus this weeks post will talk about ammunition pick-ups.
As mentioned in the post about flares, our projectiles are limited due to the fact that having an endless amount would render the lack of light pointless. However, since it is a limited resource, refills can be an essential part […]