Game Development Blog 6.

Here’s a bit of music for you to listen to while you read, should you like to:

Brace for deceleration, we’re calming down.

So the last few weeks have been quite stressful for our team of 6 people. With one of our coders leaving the course and the never-ending updates and fixes that we can do to the game itself, it’s been pretty hard. That said we’re finally up in front of these things  and it’s looking like the game might be finished in time for the presentation.

This week I will be talking about 2 things. First I will be talking about the design behind our high-score menu, and secondly about the overall game and how it has been to develop a game during these 10 weeks.

So first, our high-score screen, and here it is:

It is important to note that I did not create this on my own. I supplied a vision and a design for our Lead Artist and he created this. My submission looked like this:

As you can see I supplied the design and overall idea of the image for a placeholder, and where my artistic capabilities fell short he supplied the knowledge and skills to create something complete.

I think it ended up looking very well, with the exception that it’s lacking a position for a “Back” button, but perhaps we can put that on the moon in the top-right corner.

We wanted to show the high scores of previous players on headstones to give the player the idea that all the previous thieves have been shot and killed, and their valuables etched into their headstones. This makes sense in one way, but if our player clears the map (our only map) it makes little sense that his high score would be displayed on a headstone if he escaped. However I think this is something that can be overlooked. I’m very pleased with the state-screen.

Secondly then on the project as a whole. It’s been hard work and at times infuriating. Most of my classmates seem to hate the games they’ve been developing at this point, and they want to move forward and do something completely different now. I don’t. I love my first production. It has many flaws, it’s rugged, not very consistent and lacks several elements to make it crisp and neat and complete. But it’s mine, and we did this over 10 weeks. Imagine what we could do with 2 years.

This course has been amazing, aggravating, hurtful and painful all at once. I’ve laughed and groaned, but we made it through and in one and a half week we release our very first production.

Thank you for reading this far.

There will be more to come in the future.

Signing off with a smile,

//William

Game Development Blog 5.

Dearie me, we’re all beat.

Everyone is working really hard in our group in order to get everything into the beta-version of the game. It’s starting to really come together, now, all that needs to be done is finishing up the level-design, add the pickups, and after that our coders can finally get going for real on the pathfinding.

As for what I’ve done this week, there’s been a number of small things, a few big things and some running about between group members. A lot of time has been taken out of the week due to other courses and work irrelevant to this particular course however, and as such I feel like there was a lot of rushing the last few days of the week.

Onto my work, and here it is:

This flowerpot, something that I drew today in fact, is a decorative  item for use in Ottos fancy mansion. It’s doesn’t do anything apart from look pretty.

As I’m looking at it now though, I realize the colours might be very wrong for something to use in a mansion that is mostly laid dark and carries with it a lot of gloom and neglect.  That said I am really happy with how it looks, nevermind the fitting in. I wanted to use some darker color for the pot itself, the purple, but got carried away with the decoration and ended up using a very bright cyan for the rim of the pot. After that the flowers themselves are by nature very colorful, and as such I used reds, yellows, and shades of green and blue to paint them.  I think this item will be seen again and again in quite a few rooms in the game.

This is the artifact I am most happy with so far, since it took quite a while to get it right.

This is one of the big things I worked on:

Its the options screen for our game, without the buttons. This thing I rushed through unfortunately, since I wanted it in the game for our presentation. I might clean it up, or not, we’ll see. I used colors from our wall-tiles to use as the walls in this picture, to simmulate that you are inside the Fancy Mansion. I also placed Ottos hat and his shotgun by the chair. The menu buttons can not be seen here but I spent more work on them than the actual background.

This is what I’ve done this week. Thanks for reading!

//Will

Game Development Blog 4.

So. Week 2 of Beta. Didn’t think we’d still be a team by now. We had a lot of bumps along the road, and some dangerous obstacles still in it. That said, we’re still progressing steadily as a group and having fun with what we’re doing.

This week I have been working with a lot of smaller things. I’ve done some audio editing with the sound we recorded with David Crosson as our voice for Otto. All of the sounds were stereo tuned and played only from the right speaker or earbud, which is something that needed adressing.  In order to fix this I used Audacity, a program used for editing audio in all its forms. It’s a freeware and very basic, which meant I didn’t have to learn the whole program in order to do this. Though I suspect I will have to revisit these sounds in order to edit the sound-levels so they match the other sounds we are adding into the game. I also looked at what sounds we are gonna use for our powerups, as the placeholder we’d been using thus far have been the same noise as when you pick up a small object without an additional effect applied to it.

Apart from editing sounds, I’ve been thinking of how to incorporate our secret level into the game logically. We have some brilliant ideas, but due to technical limitations in how we edit maps and levels, we are having some problems in how to do it properly.

As for an artifact I created this week, I chose to work on a sword that works as a powerup and pickup in the game. It remains to be seen if this particular artifacts makes it into the game as a powerup, though if nothing else, we could add it in as nothing more than a valuable pickup.  The idea is that the sword I created puts all the items in your immediate vicinity in your inventory, effectively cutting short the time it would take to collect them.  This, I feel would be a very cool and interesting powerup / game-mechanic, but at the end of the day it’s up to our coders to make it happen. The artifact itself is done, all that needs to be done with it now is to run it by Marcus, our lead art, and that should be it to put it in the spritesheet and have it finished for beta and Final.

That’s it for this week.