2018.03.18 – A SHMUP Postmortem

Over the course of the last 10 weeks, we -my team and I- have developed a game concept entitled “You May Kiss The Bride”, abbreviated as YMKTB, in the context of our second semester “Game Design 2: Game Development” module (course code:5SD064). The concept was created by a group of fellow students during our first semester’s “Game Design 1: Introduction” module (course code: 5SD065).
In this postmortem blog post, I will be going over the highlights, both good and bad, of […]

2018.03.08 – Playtesting Aesthetics V.S. Narrative Design and 3rd-party I.P.

Game concept overview
Our team had chosen a concept titled “You May Kiss the Bride” where the character got cold feet the day before the wedding. The player would then take over the commitment-phobic character and be thrown into a a nightmare. There s/he is trying to escape the commitment they were about to undertake with their significant other by running away from it just before they did their vows and making their way to the church’s exit while fighting their […]

2018.03.01 – Maximizing your Audio budget using pitch variation

Why do we need sound?
In order to help the player enter into the magic circle, we need to consider all aspects of the game feel such as movement, visual cues, and audio feedback. Today we will be tackling the last one.
Audio helps us conveying information to the player by engaging another sense besides visual and tactile (e.g. rumble). Relaying feedback via audio, allows us to:

further immerse the player by making sure all possible sense are engaged in the universe we […]

2018.02.22 – Agile-ish Game Development w/ Scrum

A primer on Scrum
Source: https://blog.ganttpro.com/en/waterfall-project-management-methodology-pros-and-cons/
Today we will be tackling a topic many of your may have heard of, SCRUM. Some call it agile development, some lean, others yet have referred to it as Kanban practices. All of them are fulfilling a certain need to move away from traditional management, often called waterfall management due to the way it plans, schedule and executes projects.
SCRUM has been the preferred management methodology for software development for a while.  However, it has […]

2018.02.15 – Enemy follow/move towards Player in a 2D Environment (NOT Pathfinding!)

Topic: How to create a basic “chasing” A.I. (i.e. stupid zombie like )
Why this is NOT pathfinding!
Simply put pathfinding implies obstacle avoidance, which this method doesn’t do. In other words, using the method described below, your enemies will be running head first into obstacles and do so until they are killed or they are destroyed.
Why it is a working placeholder solution for our game?
Considering the enemies in this game are wedding-attendees who transformed into zombie-like demons, the player expects […]

2018.02.08 – The Unity Animator, the good, the bad and the ugly

Topic: Animations in Unity 2017.3 using the Animator component
Animation in a pre-alpha sprint, why?
Animation, while not an alpha feature per-se, was something our (Team Hastur) artists were asking for better in the engine (Unity 2017.3) Q.A. of their work as well as a confidence boost by seeing their work being implemented in the game.
Furthermore, we had to see whether the rough animation pattern we had thought out for the NPCs would tie in with our mechanics and enhance the gameplay […]

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