Level Design

Recently I have been working on level design. The idea we have behind building a level with everything in a predetermined place, is to make sure we can engineer the experience the player will receive from our game. We want the player to find the game mysterious, feel like they are looking for something unnatural and scary. The way we can do that is to scale down the challenge in terms of enemies. If we have enemies there, we can […]

Design Feedback – 4

You are describing well your thought-process behind the music for the game. It amazes me how accurate and detailed your decisions were behind all of this. In a very clear manner you describe the background to your game and how other cultural influences your music for your boss level. I’ve listened to the track multiple times and I can really get the feel for the Umibozu aesthetic. It is very spooky and it adds something extra when playing a mysterious […]

Animations, Sprites and my consequent thoughts thereon

So, for the last couple of weeks I have been making sprites – mostly. I am not particularly good at – and I do not particularly enjoy, making animations. Nonetheless, it’s a task that needs to be done, and I am one of two people who is doing it. Well, I was – until our second artist suddenly quit the course last week, leaving me with some more sprites to finished than I bargained for. It’s fine though, I’m lucky […]

4. More sounds

This week I worked with some sounds for our game. In the beginning of this week I borrowed a disk from Finn with a lot of non-copyright sounds on it. It have helped me very much since there are sounds that i can’t produce myself and the internet could not provide me with good quality sounds like this. I worked specifically with the sounds for one of our enemies together with the sounds for the playable character.
The sounds I needed […]

Squishy Squashi Squids

 

For our enemy our first thought was squids because or art style is steam punk and you see a lot of squids or octopus in steam punk style.
I and so many other graphics students at Game Design are new to animation. We have not had any other assignments than doing bouncy balls so stretch and squash was not that new to us.
There were a lot of struggles in trying to get it right and understanding how animation works. Squash and […]

Cheeky Checkpoints

This week I’ll be talking about the cause of my headache last week and the waste of many hours, checkpoints. They’re not entirely the cause though, it’s more because of stubbornness, tunnel vision and probably some idiocy.
Where the problems started
In our game you’re progressing through a level left to right, and as the level is a little lengthy we want checkpoints so the player doesn’t have to redo all of it. This was to be my main task for last […]

Blog Post #4 Background music

!Link to sound clip at the end!
Welcome back once again to my blog, today I will tell you about my design process with the background music as the lead sound designer of team Cockatrice.
Take a moment and picture yourself in this situation. You are out at sea on a chilly night, it’s hard to anything and it’s critical that you are able to navigate through these waters to get home. The wind is in your face, you’re shivering from the […]

Boaty intelligence

The ocean is dangerous – it’s easy to get lost in the mist and monsters lurk under the surface. Well, they’re supposed to. They need AI in order to bring life to the game and immersiveness to the player. The AI defines how the creatures behave and how they can interact with the player. There are unlimited ways to do this, but all of them might not be boaty enough. Let’s get the boaty intelligence working.
Bringing sprites to life
The squid gang. […]

May Ahab a Moment of Your Time?: Designing the Leviathan (and Friends)

I do not view myself as someone who thinks outside the box. Instead, I prefer to believe I bring a shovel before I go inside. By working within the confines of what is given to me, I feel I am more creative than if I was without constraint. It is this mentality I adopted as always when I began working with “Aetherial.” (Disclaimer: The following work is representative of an ongoing process and subject to change)
Brainstorming
In the beginning of development […]

Catching up

Describing Scrum and me and my groups experience with is all well and good, but I also want to go over some of the things I have been producing these last two weeks. Right now we are coming up on the Beta deadline for our project, and, due to some of the reasons stated in my previous blog post, we are a little bit behind in terms of art assets. Which meant that it has been the time for me […]

5SD064 – Game Design Blog 01/03

Level Design and the introduction of difficulty, enemies and mechanics.
Hello again! This is the fourth blog post on my game design blog and this week I will describe my process of designing the level for the game our team is currently developing – Beelonging.
To begin with, Beelonging is what’s called a ”Shmup”, that stands for ”Shoot ‘em up”. It’s one of the earliest concepts of classic game design. Amongst famous retro arcade games you might’ve heard of games such as […]

Background layering

Entry Journal 2018/03/01
In this week’s blog post I will be touching upon the background sprites that I have created for Aetherial. As you probably know by now, the game me and my group are developing is a 2D side scrolling shoot em up, where the player controls a flying vessel that shoots down aliens from the sky.
In order to create the feeling of depth, the background had to be drawn by using multiple layers of content. Much as in the […]