Cobbling things like a carpenter – or reusing assets

As we are heading into the final sprints I’m sure we all have noticed the need for polish and just the feelings that we don’t have enough time to finish everything we want to do. Well my team definitely noticed this, and after trimming and cutting some content we were left with a list of things that needed to be done until release. Then we took that list and looked at what could be done with the help of old […]

Project Aetherial Blog Four

Introduction
We are rapidly approaching the BETA and a lot of things must be decided and implemented. Playtesting sessions has come and passed by, with a great many relevant comments having helped us shape our game. Aside from the game design course, we graphical artists have also had our hands full with the animations of our minor course.
For this week’s blog I will put my focus on the final “common” enemy of our game, which is the so-called sky tangler (a jellyfish). […]

Dmesh and Player Avatar

Dmesh is a software used to make low poly images from pictures. How does it work?
Every 3 dots, the software makes a triangle with the average colour contrained between those 3 dots. Setting the points manually is preferred for the best results, as it usually makes the most freaky combinations automatically. You better do it fast, though, because it usually stops working with no reason, loosing all the progress. High five! Fun times.

The same style can be achieved in photoshop […]

Game Design journal 4

Mikael Ferroukhi                                                                                                                            date: 01/03/18
5SD064
During this week I have been working on a Level layout design. Up to now, me and my team had been working on our game Umibozu without any real structure concerning how the game actually take place. We knew the enemies, the character and its power ups, the obstacles, the boss and etc.. but we never explicitly said how all of this would be organized inside of the game.
At first the idea for our game was to […]

Lightning laser breath attack thingy

This week I’ve primarily been working on the boss of our game, Aetherial. The boss of the game is a huge, flying whale, that you as a player is supposed to hunt down. The boss appears multiple times during the game, at first you only see its back as it soars through the clouds, but in the final scene you actually face this leviathan head-on. During this fight the boss will use several attacks against the player, one of which […]

1st of March

Our team member from the Game Design minor finished constructing the overall layout of our level earlier this week. It consisted of large horizontal wall sections, placed in such a way as to create different paths for the player to travel. He then handed it over to me so that I could build the actual level using all of our art assets. It quickly became apparent during the process of placing assets and decorating the level that it’s very beneficial […]

Blog Post #4 – Pew pew!

As we near closer to Beta I have been busy filling out the rest of the sounds for Behemoth as new abilities and power-ups are added to the game. During our last play-test, there were some requests for “big” sounds like a huge explosion when you fire your “super mega awesome wave” (name pending) which is a special ability that destroys all enemies on the screen. Since this is such a powerful ability, it should have a powerful sound. For […]

Blog 4

Squids and their movement
So this week I will go back a bit and take a look at how I designed the second enemy in our game, the giant squid. I will as per usual attempt to reflect and reason a bit around the decisions i made while working on the squid.
So for this game revolving around mystery and uncertainty I wanted the an enemy that reflects those feelings. Now, while the Great white I worked on previously is a fitting […]

Parallaxing & Background

When sitting in a car or train and looking at the fence by the road, the poles of the fence passes so quickly, the trees at the side of the road as well. Things further away seems to stay longer and you have more time to look at them.
When creating a 2D game we want to have the illusion of having a 3D space, even though it is not. Having different “layers” of background objects moving at different speed gives […]

Communicating function through visual means

Our group’s version of Friendship Down features an antagonist, robotic species that make up the game’s enemy units.  For reasons of time, we had to cut any boss fights from development. Because of this, we had to make as much use of the enemy units as possible in order to provide some form of gameplay variety, as well as an escalating sense of progression over the course of the game. There are three enemy units, each with their own specific […]

Blog Post 4 – Pine Trees

Time to talk about something else than bugs! and scrum
Since Beelonging is set in a forest we of course had to have some trees, since it would look pretty empty otherwise. Me and Natali (the other artist in our group) planned some background assets that we then split between us. I decided to make pine trees, since I think they’re beautiful and because we decided to have a North European taiga forest in our game. We thought that featuring such […]

YOU DIED- 5SD064 HANNA AHO LIND

This sprint I was tasked with making a “death” or “losing” sprite of our submarine, for when it has been hunted down by the giant fish. I decided to go for three different aproaches but with the same teqnicues. I choosed the same brushes and decided to go with a theme of red- to symbolise and communicate danger.
It boiled down to these three concepts, one where I black out all the colour of the submarine and replace the blue light, […]