Making a Game Part 3 – Shooting

So, here we are again.
This week I chose to try implementing animations and shooting, both of which being pretty big additions to a game.
However, this post will only be about the shooting, leaving the animations for another day.
First thoughts about shooting: bullets need to be their own object and only spawned/despawned when actually in use, so as to not cause unnecessary performance-drops.
The bullets also need to be associated with the player, the enemies and the walls, so an efficient way […]

So much confusion

So this week I have been working on the UI. In detail it is the parent meter, parent circles, arrows and indicators. Now I will tell you what things do and how it works. So inside the parent meter you have circles in different colors, they represent parents that are on their way to pick up their children. To know whose child is whose we will have arrows pointing at the child with the same color as the circle, that […]

So much confusion

So this week I have been working on the UI. In detail it is the parent meter, parent circles, arrows and indicators. Now I will tell you what things do and how it works. So inside the parent meter you have circles in different colors, they represent parents that are on their way to pick up their children. To know whose child is whose we will have arrows pointing at the child with the same color as the circle, that […]

Enemy Collision

Jag har denna vecka suttit och pysslat mestadels med Barn vs Barn Kollision. Från början tänkte jag att jag kanske skulle kunna använda samma kollisionsfunktion som jag använde till platformern. Detta visade sig vara mycket problematiskt eftersom programmet crashade när jag försökte fixa så att ungarna hade en kollider vilket gjorde det hela en aning problematiskt. När jag kom på att det var för mycket jobb för att fixa bestämde jag mig istället för att skriva en ny, egen funktion […]

Third Artifact: Pathfinding and Grid building

This week I will talk a bit about our pathfinding. (Warning: Confusing)

There are a couple of different pathfinding algorithms out there, on the internet. There are Breath-first, Best-first, Dijkstra, A*(A-star), etc. Almost everyone, on different forums, suggest A* as pathfinding algorithm for most games. It is reasonable fast in most instances, even though some of the others were quicker in some scenarios.
A*, like most other algorithms, needs a tile based system to search through.
Each Tile, or Cell, is given […]

My first font!

Hello readers, today I will talk about fonts and one I created. This is the first font I’ve ever done and I will walk you through my process. I started with researching about fonts and how make them. I started out in photoshop, created a grid and started drawing at low resolution. The reason I chose low resolution is because of the game’s art style. The game is supposed to be very pixelated and low resolution so this font was […]

Artifact of the week, AI.

Hello dear class mate(s).
This week I have been working with some simpler kind of AI. As always we have been using Box2D mostly for walls but that isn’t anything that I plan on rambling on every post about how it works, just so you know where the b2vec is coming from. 
Before  the feature freeze we decided that we probably should cut down on the number of enemies. We had four of them planned at that point. It is 3 and […]

Suit Em’ Up – Buggers

Hello again!
 
This week I have been working on our melee enemy “the Bugger”. He is a flying mad bug who when he sees you will do anything to head-butt you. His A.I is pretty smart as he tries to see where you’re heading and charges towards that point to cut you off and smash you into little robot pieces which makes him a though opponent.

The main thing I have done this week is doing the moving animation for Buggers in […]

Suit Em’ Up – Buggers

Hello again!
 
This week I have been working on our melee enemy “the Bugger”. He is a flying mad bug who when he sees you will do anything to head-butt you. His A.I is pretty smart as he tries to see where you’re heading and charges towards that point to cut you off and smash you into little robot pieces which makes him a though opponent.

The main thing I have done this week is doing the moving animation for Buggers in […]

Week 6 – With Intent

This week Have been pretty harsh, the Light Engine ”Let There Be Light” is obviously not optimised for OpenGL properly, so put out more than 2 update-able lights and you get some serious bugs on OS X.
I see no way around this unless I reconfigure the whole LTBL library, which I don’t really have time for right now. For testing Purposes with less lights I can still test the code on Mac with the Prototype, for the full game […]

A* Pathfinding

Today I am going to talk about path finding, more specifically A* path finding which is just one of many methods of doing path finding.

What is path finding?
Essentially, path finding is a technique for finding a way trough a bunch of obstacles from point A to point B.
In general you apply path finding with AI, but there are other cases that path finding is used as well.

What is A*?
A* is a heuristic graph based algorithm.
A grid of nodes is used to […]

Animations, Level Design and Credits Menu!

This week, in contrast to last week, I’ve mostly been doing some practical work. One of the tasks of the week has been to improve upon the animations we’ve been using so far in the proejct.
Simon Fredell did the original, few, frames while I have been improving on his work, turning 4 frames into 7, 8 into 15, etc, manually tweening between each frame.
Below is two images to illustrate what I’ve been doing.
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Tweening, or inbetweening […]