Playground Panic #4 – Hierarchy, optimization and control

After some discussing with our SCRUM-master Simon Wulf, we agreed on having to change our code-structure. Due to reasons (mainly time-pressure and lack of experience), we handled sprites in our GameState together with the rest of the code. It’s pretty simple to do with SFML’s built in things, but for overall optimization and to avoid clusterfuckyness in the code, it’s much better to let the objects themselves handle these kinds of things and let the GameState stay in the unknown […]

Game dev, Suit’em up – Animations in different directions

We have released a friends & family beta test and gotten some statistics of the current status of our game.
You are welcome to participate, here is the link to the feedback: feedback-form
And here is a link to the game, please fill in feedback if you play!: SuitEmUp FnF pre-beta
I have made animations work in different directions for enemies and the player. This is not implemented in the version I linked above but I will explain what is […]

Level Design and Sound Generate Mechanic

Level Design
This week has seen some major changes to the map. We’ve changed the colour scheme, added new areas (which means redrawing A LOT of collision, light and entities). I’ve made some pretty extensive mock-ups on paper, and tried changing walkpaths around in order for the Aesthetic goals the game set out to create, to be fulfilled.
Sooo many Areas have been torn down, rebuilt, just to be torn down again and just scrapped. It’s got to be perfect! Although, this […]

Game configurations

Today I am going to talk about game configurations and how they were implemented in the project. A configuration file is just a ordinary text file with game information that is loaded into the game. But I am not doing this the ordinary way, I am using something much better.We start of this post by asking ourselves a question.
Why do we need configurations?Every game needs some sort of configuration to make it easier to change things on demand and making it […]

Playground Panic #3 – Ratatatatatatasplash

This week was filled with bug-fixes and different improvements in our previous assets. My main focus was spent on the View(port) and making it work smoothly with both edges and the player. Unfortunately due to a couple of meetings today, I don’t happen to have it in a completed state right now, so that will probably be on my next blog-post! Instead, I figured I would talk about how the shooting works.
The shooting, aka. the sponge-projectiles (we’re child-friendly here), are […]

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 […]

Houston we have reached foul circle

So lets try to listen to my comments and learn from them! I will now try to write about artifacts rather than talk about every decision and achievement in programming I’ve done.
This week have been actually pretty effective. I’ve been working these past weeks a lot with states to understand and following my classmates advice
-if you want to do it, do it everywhere
So during the week I’ve been working on getting a pause state going so you can orientate to […]

Playground Panic #2 – Viewports

One of the things that makes our game unique is how you need to find and clean a kid before their parent(s) come to pick their kid up. This creates a tension that simply running around to clean the kids wouldn’t achieve, but it also required a large map and the ability to move around in it.
During the development-process so far we have only had a single-colored background. With a background added in, the game took a big visual step […]

Treshhold overcomed

This week has been a series of half-assed opinions and motivations boosts for our group. We’ve been working on getting our orientation between our states better handled, getting sound into our game, customizing our character and getting a score to show up on the screen. Our producer have been tackled with the presentation assignment and working out the documentation for our group while I took a leave of absent from being a lead designer(when it came to documentation) and focused […]

Blogging code in a manner pleasable

From now on I will be a lot more thorough with my updates. Since a few weeks back I’ve been working with my old group on a shooter game. I will not reveal what aesthetics we’re going with but I will start blo

Playground Panic #1 – Player movement

Since we’re doing a top-down shooter, we wanted 8 different directions to walk in that we used the different combinations of WASD for. We also had to make the player rotate depending on where the mouse were on the screen. SFML does this a lot easier than when we worked with SDL, especially on the input-side. We went from having a full input-class to one line basically and if we ever need more control than that we can change it […]

Production and re-do.

We have started our first sprint and are now in production, this Monday we set up our sprint planning and started writing on our individual parts of the code. I remade the Hiding prototype and then went on to work with player movement for our alpha. I really should start writing each day because i can barley remember the lectures we had since this Monday. I feel like days are starting to float together. We missed our meeting with our […]