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 […]

The Tragedy of the Missing User Stories

The Beginning of the End
As the title suggests, my group is not using user stories. The reason for this horrendous act can be summed up in two parts.
First of all, the user stories that I had been given from my fellow designer were lackluster (I have no ill will towards you, it was everyone’s first attempt at user stories). The amount of stories were poor, they did not cover the entire concept document and the parts that were supposedly covered […]

Game Design – Designing the enemy’s movement pattern and behavior

Hi everyone! This week I will explain the process of the enemy movement and the design for it. As the designer of group Vampire I got the task to design the enemy’s movement pattern and behavior. The game we are developing, Umibozu, originally had 3 types of enemies in the game; a crab, a squid and a shark.
Image 1, concept art of the enemies from the concept document
Due to lack of time, we decided to only have the squid and […]

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). […]

Boss behaviors in shooting game

This week I implemented the behaviors of the Boss in our game. Though we already have a draft about some basic ideas and patterns, we still encountered some detailed problem which made us to abandoned several previous thoughts.
In general, the boss is a giant fish with high health point and powerful attack. I divided boss behaviors to three parts. One is the entering state, after a player cleared the final wave of enemies the boss spawning logic triggered. It be […]

Level Design

The most important task i currently have ongoing is creating the level layouts for our game. Aetherial has an aesthetic goal of making the player feel like a champion, of which I interpret the difficulty of the game will largely convey.  And so I am attempting to find a good balance between making the game difficult while at the same time empowering the player, making them feel like they are really good at the game quickly.
Creating and testing levels is […]

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 […]

Blog post 4 – Adding the animations to the objects

We in the group Archon are working on a game named Aetherial and it is part of our school project. And for the past week we have been working on the goals for the Beta presentation. And the thing I have worked the most on for this sprint is Implementing the Animations for the game and make it behave as they should. I needed to make scripts and put them on to the different objects, because it will make the […]

Group dynamics and high performing teams

With the arcade project just around the corner, people are starting to form their own groups ahead of it. It is clear that the people who have ambitions and the motivation to create something great are seeking each other out. Many of the other  project managers have already managed to form teams of highly skilled individuals.
At first it was also my intention to try to create such a group. However, I ended up not doing so. I am still one […]

Dev Blog #4 -The Unseen Work of a Producer

Hello again!
This is the last week before the beta deadline for the first year students’ upcoming Shoot ’em Up games, so I thought this was a good time to talk about the unseen work of the production. By unseen work I mean things that don’t produce tangible results the same way art and code does.
As a producer of a small team I need to wear many hats, but the majority of the work I do can’t be seen or measured, […]

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 […]

Presenting the Alpha

Okay, making a game is one thing, but presenting it to a potential publisher (or just fellow students!), making a great first impression, showing all the cool stuff, gently manoeuvring around what has not been polished yet and keeping it all very succinct is very different. And it usually is very difficult to accomplish. That being said, I enjoyed making the Alpha Presentation of Fear is in me very much despite the fact it wasn’t nearly as significant as trying […]