BGP – Day 2

Target Audience
So today I’ve done several things, first the day started with me having to create something that will summarize our target audience for our presentation tomorrow. Since we don’t have the time to research for and find our specific target audience we instead choose to look at similar games that we are inspired by. Therefor it is easy to state that our game will appeal to players that like those games since they will be similar to ours.  This is what […]

The Big Game Project – Amenti – Day 1

The start of the big game project
I’m starting to write again since this is the start of our final course during the second year of game design at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland.  This is were we are tasked to create a game of our choice either by creating a new concept or by joining on someone else’s concept.  And I have joined the project called Amenti. Which is a mystical puzzle game set in an ancient Egyptian pyramid. That sums up […]

Post Mortem: Our Mutual Friend Felicia

Hello every reader out there, I’m back after another hiatus, to actually start this up again. I’m going to get into posting once a week again, it was a nice habit and allowed me to talk about game design.
So what do we have here?
Lately I’ve been working on Alternate Reality games and Ubiquitious games a lot and it all boiled down to a game I like to call, Our Mutual Friend, Felicia.
Our Mutual Friend, Felicia (or OMFF for short) is […]

Reflections about the research done so far

https://github.com/aigamedev/btsk
There is a book, Game AI Pro, in which one chapter explains and creates the code found in the link above. It is the Behavior Tree Starter Kit (BTSK). The book explains the difference between behavior and actions. Behaviors are the set of logical expressions deciding what the AI does, in other words; what action it takes. An even more formal description is that Behaviors are the nodes in the tree who are parents. The leaf nodes either checks the status of […]

Game Production Afterthoughts

It’s over. Our ten-week march is over and we have a game. Or, at least, something that constitutes as a game? I am being super harsh here. Do we have a game with a start and an end? Yes. Can you finish the game? You could if you are very good from the start. So, ok, we have a game. Could it have been better? By a lot. Yay! We have a bit undercooked game. Not bad for a bunch […]

Planning a BT

I have been away from blogging and making games for almost a year now. I had a lot of things going on at the same time since my education in game design and programming. But I have kept contact with some class mates and a few months ago (January 2017) I was inspired by Force Arena, a fast paced mmo rts – game (Massively Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy). You play a hero who can move, attack and strategically place […]

Students interviewed about Alt.Ctrl:GDC

Local press caught up with our students as they returned from exhibiting at Alt.Ctrl:GDC: “The place to be om man är spelutvecklare”
Posted in Publicity by Ulf Benjaminsson

5sd064 Turning the power-ups into pickup-able items

Hello again, Thomas Härdin here turning back to the power-ups of our game. As I’ve written about before I had to decide on the functionality of this games power-ups which turned out to be some fairly easily manageable enhancements to the players projectiles when playing in the hacking mode. We did get three of them, a rapid fire function that activates when 8 enemies are killed, a wider shot that you get through pressing a button, same as the wide […]

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 […]

Vertex Colors

Vertex colors. It’s color data stored at vertices and you can do some pretty cool stuff with them. Most of the time you won’t have any need for vertex colors, and in unity the only shaders that make use of them are sprites, but when you’re making your own shaders you can do some pretty nifty things. Vertex colors can be used as a cheap way to shade or color meshes by combining the color with the diffuse, but a much […]

#5 “Sorry guys i need to do my homework” – Planing parallel projects.

Hi everyone!
Today i want to talk about the backlog and parallel projects.
It is common to encounter problems while working with two projects at once. At the moment we tend to structure our work so that it clashes with our ordinary school work. Handling scheduling gets difficult and our insight into our teammates situations regarding time spent on lectures, homework and other school-related activities tend to be vague at best. Many blame the schools scheduling and lack of communication for the […]

Polish and additional fixes

This week has been focused on polish. Especially when it comes to the levels and animations.
I have done some fixes to the animation, some final touches so that everything looks good for the final release.
There were some hiccups when it comes to the animations. For example, Marbles started to flap and move her legs when we put her animations into the game, the troubleshooting was a long and was a bit tedious, but when we found the problem then the […]