Development Blog

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.

— Oscar Wilde.

Week 1:

During week one, I was mainly deciding on whether my game should be 3D or 2D based. This had a lot to do with the future devvelopment, concept and idea on its own. Therefore I was mainly searching into vast kinds of information forums and youtube videos based on this matter. Mainly looking into what kind of development I will be working with for a long period of time, progress that will be made and background knowledge on game development.

Week 2:

Role of AI and decision upon what AI should I implement based on the theme of the game and overall player progression. I have decided to go with 2D game because of my passion and interest in developing specifically 2D platforming game. Therefore I had to decide upon what the idea behind was and how the enemy AI should behave, look and function. Messed around with a scene, items and overall design which was slowly leading me towards the final image of how I would like everything to look and feel like.

Week 3:

Created an environment. Used Unity assets store for this. Tried from cosmic wallpaper and some tiles, as well as a simple “forest” with trees on the background and some wooden blocks to jump upon. Still am not sure of the concept but thought of Hide and seek example where 1 enemy chases the main character. Researched on reactive agents and steering behaviour in order to understand and further implement them.

Week 4:

Furthermore Created an in game environment, manipulated with some unity assets and dived into courses on youtube about character creation. Created a base model of red goo, did not like it. Searched for a bunch of character assets. Found some knights and medieval pack which I enjoyed manipulating and investigating how to use and move these characters. They looked more like an enemy archetypes even though some could be used as a main character. Worked with some collision items and effects such as bows and arrows, fireballs, damage counters, health, and overall look of everything.

Week 5:

Creating and messing around with character. Sample movements, animation, “fighting” styles to make character look more realistic and cooler. Created a file called “player controller” through which I manipulated with a bunch of new ideas and movements in order to fully understand what I can and want to do with my character. Also important point to mention I have messed around 20 characters before I found a suitable one for game in both style and feel.

Week 6:

Enemy generation. Simply coming up with an enemy model and planning what it will do and how it will interact with a player. There were multiple ideas such as chasers, runners, hide-and-seek. Also a map and tiles were important to take into account with how enemy will interact in it’s movement and towards main character correspondence to the game world. Overall I came up with a simple enemy that has a chase mechanism within a certain radius as well as later I decided to add a runner that changed the idea of the game completely, but I am very satisfied with it in the end. 🙂

Week 7:

Enemy controller. Enemy is an important part of the game as well as AI that is going to work for the correspondence of such an enemy in the game so I was thinking a lot about the techniques to use towards the game. An important games that contributed towards this part were Super Smash Bros as it is also a platformed game as well as a fighting one, therefore it had a brilliant AI where in the “controller” regime, you can set AI to do a specific task or choose a difficulty to fight with. Of course I could not achieve such a vast AI in my game, therefore I thought of something that could correspond equally, like simple Mario game.

Week 8:

Adjusting game to the final archetype. As I was fairly confident with what game was about to look and play like, I was making sure that all “pieces” were in their place and those parts especially the programming bits that were not yet in place, will be fine during the future instalment. An important point to mention: somewhere during the middle of the work, camera and controls were not working together so a lot of time and effort was placed into learning and correcting that. Animation was taking a lot of time and decision upon which movement should be implemented and which should “just be there”.

Week 9:

Game Manager polish. As game manager had a lot going on such as re-spawning, health management, jumping, collision, procedural animation both in jumping and attacking and etc. It had a lot to do with the game so adding some new features and making sure that the old ones were working was also an important part during this weeks working process. Project seems to work fine, even though there are a lot of thing that require my attention such as health “pop-up”. Whether it should be above players character or simply “above”. In the end decided that it is hard to see the value and search for it as character moves and jumps too quickly and this can become irritating and tiresome for the eyes.

Week 10:

Camera control was also an important part so during the final week I was polishing everything and making sure that camera was “feeling right” as player does not want to see an empty space while character is walking somewhere around where you can not see him. A lot more and a final thought on the project and process can be found on “Analysis and reference page”, which contains main information as these are just a short reviews upon what has been done during the week and they do not represent the final project.