next »

[Mogensen]

Hello everyone!

We are a small team of students in sweden, currently developing our very first game.
The game is going to be called AstroScape and is going to be a 2D platformer. In the game, you play as an astronaut on a spacestation invaded by aliens!

We're currently just getting started, impying that we haven't done much developing so far.

We hope that you'll find our game enjoyable once it's finished and we also hope that you will take intrest in following this devlog!

Names and nicknames:

Hugo Mogensen (XyaMorph)
Felix Ulvmåne
Fabian Haglund
Saif Khoder (Saiif1)
Ellen Lindau (Zattari kattis)

[voltaicore]

If you need an audio engineer or audio producer be sure to message me so we can work something out for AstroScape

[Felix.Ulvmåne]

Over the last week i've been working with the making the player character move naturally in the game enviorment and worked alot on collision.

I had alot of trouble with making the the character stop shaking everytime he hit a wall or a floor, but with some adjusments i've been abled to make everything go smooth.

Now the collision works like this;

1.
Input from the player is received and how far the player will move this frame is decided.

2.
The player is moved pixel by pixel in a loop.

3.
If the player collides with a solid object, he is pushed out of it and his speed is set to 0 so that he wont move further in that direction.

This works very well and collision feels smooth and nice.

Here is an illustration of how the collision works:

[Mogensen]

For this first update in the Graphics department of Astroscape, we've made a couple of animations. The animations include walking, shooting, dying and an idle animation for the player. We have also made two animations for our stationary enemy, a gun turret. These animations have been put together in so called "sprite sheets", which displays a frame by frame png picture of each animation. Apart from animations, we've also worked on a tileset for the leveldesign.

Turret Death Animation                       Turret Shooting Animation
   

Player Idle                  Player Walking
   

   Player Shooting                     Player Death


Tileset                                   


Example Sprite Sheet

[Mete]

What is going on with the guy animation? lol

[Mogensen]

Which one?

[Mogensen]

Another week, another update!

For this week i've created a design for our melee attaking enemy, who's meant to resemble a classic cartoon alien.
The enemy is only meant to be able to strike the player with his energy blade at a set range, but there is no attack animation to show of that range as of now. The only animations that has been completed for our melee enemy so far are his idle and walking animations.

A size comparison between our player character and the alien:

       

[Fabian Haglund]

This past week on the programming side, I´ve been working on a state manager. The game can now switch between the Intro, Main menu and the actual gameplay. I ran into some problems regarding the switch between the main menu and gameplay. It didn´t stay in the state I wanted it to. but with some changes to draw and update order and to the manager itself resolved those problems.

I´ve also fixed button functionality for the eventual main menu.
Here is the picture I hastely made as a work exampel.

[Zatari Kattis]

Hello everyone who is interested in this game! Zatari checking in from the graphics team.

This game is so much fun working on and I'm very curious about how it'll look in the finished version. I'm mostly working with the backgrounds and flooring of the game, though I've done some small things like the turret, health and jetpack fuel pickup. The turret was one of my fist things that i worked on for this project and I'm very proud of how it turned out. As i said, the tiles are all made by me and those are the things I'm going to talk about right now.

Flooring tiles

The floor was first meant as a test and wasn't going to be my final work. Though, due to time I decised that they looked good enough and i didn't want to spend anymore time with them. I though, "Ok, they are pretty simple and boring, so... Let's just add somewhat of a detail, i guess." And therefore I put red details on them. I thought that was going to make them stand out more, otherwise the floors would be compleatly grey and boring.

Wall tiles

Sheesh doing these were more simple than i thought. I'll just make something you can repeat next to each other over and over...


 
... Oh, right. THAT'S BORING! LET'S MAKE SOME DETAILS! So i though, "What indicates that we are actually in space right now? Oh yeah that's right, NOTHING. I have to make it look like space so, hey, what works better than some windows? I started making windows that basically just looked like dark blue squares with white-ish stars.



BORING! We need planets! Spaceships! That is what I'm working on right now. I have the plain emptyspace windows done. All i need to do is put some planets and other space things in them and BOOM, we're in space.





Seriously, you can't be lazy as a game designer. Because you will have to make new things, fix things, remove some stuff and make sure you have everything you need to make it look good. I had a graphical bug with my flooring tiles and believe me when i say it's annoying to realize those things afterwards. I'm concidering removing some of the floor tiles since they seem compleatly useless and they just seem like "too much work" stuff.

Ok I'm jibbering a lot, at least it feels like it. I should just get down to how i did my tiles and explain the steps of making flooring and background to this game. Just in case anyone would wonder how I did it. But I think that can wait until I feel like explaining all of that and I will be showing some good pictures that could help You in your own gamecreations. I'm going to try being as accurate as possible with my explaining so that there won't be any questions. Still, I won't mind questions but, it sounded better that way.

I'm terribly sorry if the pictures I've put in this Log would disappear. This is my first time writing and I'm not really sure if the pictures will stay or not. Hopefully they won't go away. The program I use for the pictures is puush. If you have any experiance with having puush images in this kind of forums, let me know. I usually use puush to take quick screenshots of my screen. It can be your current window, desktop or a selected area of the screen. It's really handy when you want to show something to your friends over skype or other chat applications. The good thing about puush is that the picture turns into a link that you open up in your web browser and can easily be sent to anyone anywhere. Your old puushes will also stay on your account that you make on the website.

Here's a link to where you can get puush for yourself in case you'd be interested in using it.

http://puush.me/

Next time I'll explain how I whent through with the tileset and hopefully it'll be somewhat useful to somebody. I'm open for questions at any time.

That is all for now, thank you so much for reading and I hope we'll have a great day. Be good!

[saiif1]

for the past week o the programming side i've been working on the enemy, i've added 3 enemies and i added an walking animation for the enemy, i had some minor problems but i figured them out. so far we only have 3 enemies but i'm going to add more soon. and i'm going to add different animation soon like attacking.

[Mogensen]

Time for another update, this one is quite huge indeed!

First of all, the animations for the Alien (our melee attacking enemy) are all done. the animations where made by using the standard timeline animation function in Photoshop CS6. The advatage of using the timeline function is that it is a very precise tool. You can se every individual pixel and you have huge power over manipulating the animation. The disadvantage of working with the Photoshop timeline hower, is that it sometimes can be a real pain to work with. Since the tool gives you a lot of power over it, it also means that you yourself have to take care of every single little function. This includes duplicating every single frame and then slightly modifying it in order to make a new frame in the timeline. You can also not transform objects since it will add transparent pixels to the pixelart, something that we ABSOLUTELY do not want. Anyways, the animations for the alien have all been put into a single sprite sheet which includes a version of all the animations horizontally reversed. The inclusion of a reversed set of animations makes it easier for the programmers to implement reversed animations. If i did not reverse the animations in the spritesheet, there would have been a lot of trouble to reverse the animations code-wise.

Here are the animations:

   





I've also included a concept for our main menu. It is animated in the photoshop CS6 timeline aswell, which means that the animation process has included both the advatages and disadvatages of animating in the software. The main menu includes an overhead logo, buttons and a background. It was made in the resolution 1600x900, wich means an 16:9 HD Aspect ratio.

Here is a mockup and the buttons.





After all of that, the last thing that i will show you is an addition to the in-game HUD.

[Felix.Ulvmåne]

Hello, today i've been trying to include as much of the work the graphic designers have made as possible and tried to make some changes to the way the game handle resolution. I am also happy to show the first ingame image we have been abled to show you here at TigSource!


Alot of my recent changes has been to the ui system but i have been making a jetpack system for the player and apart from the some slight animation bugs it's working just fine!

[Fabian Haglund]

Hello everyone. This week I´ve been working on the pickups in the game, which are health and jetpack fuel. The process was quite a long one since I encountered alot of issues. Most of them where connected to me accidentally making things static and where a bit hard to find but where easily resolved. I had to change how i drew the animations for the pickups due to bugs that both crashed the game and messed up the texture entirely. But in the end, all was fixed and the pickups are now completely funcional and ready for usage.

[Zatari Kattis]

Hi everyone!

I've been pushing this log for almost a week now and I'm sorry for that. I've felt down lately and i still do. But I'm gonna try my best to make this log as straight forward as possible.

I'm going to talk about how I made the tiles that are being used in our project: Astroscape. And pretty much all you need for making tiles, is a program for drawing (photoshop, paint tool SAI or even windows paint) and 2 tools that you can find in every program. Pen and eraser. Easy, trust me.

When you have an idea of how you want the game to look like, things pretty much come naturally to you as you start your work. Though, most of the time, you find things that you have to change, add, remove or you simply have to redo everything because it didn't work at all.

When I did this tile set, the first thing I did was think of a color theme that i thought would fit the game. We wanted a game that would be taking place in space. And that you would be inside a big spaceship or a space station. So me thinking logically, grey was the first color i thought of. Since the typical color for a spaceship is grey and that they are made out of some sort of metal, it just seemed like the most logical thing to do. And my teammates agreed to that.

So first things first. I made a simple grey tile.



This is the basic. The color that i wanted for pretty much all of my tiles. (I forgot to mention this is the flooring, aka, the tiles that you touch or that are connected to those.) When I've stated what color the base is going to be, I start thinking of the details. I didn't want too much detail to the flooring so i made something that would indicate what side you touch.



There I've added the side to the tile which is going to be either the floor, wall or ceiling of the level. Since we wanted a sort of "inside box perspective" I figured having the same kind of tile all around would give that kind of feeling. The reason to why the red marks are cut of on the sides is because when you put them next to each other, they will look like they are connected. I also made sure all the red marks would have the same distance in-between them and that they are the same length. I chose to have red details because if they weren’t there, everything in the level would basically be grey and there would be barely any difference between wall and background. What I mean is that I wanted to make it clearly visible where the floor, wall and ceiling is. Anyway, even with the red detail, which makes the tile look drastically better than not having any other color than grey, they still looked too simple and boring. I thought some shade underneath the floor would make a nice effect to it.



This makes the colors look more connected than they did before, am I right? There aren't really any other reason to this detail. I just found it looking better this way.

When I was working with the tiles and I'd already put them in a tile set for the programmers to use. We figure that we want to have a black outline to our playable character. That's because we wanted it to look more cartoonish and we thought the tiles needed an outline too. But then i had a hard time imagining how that would even work but I tried putting a black line on the edge of every tile.



Making it look like this. The black line is on every tile that has the grey and red detail. Any other tile than that does not have any outlines.

Here's a picure of the progress of change made to the tiles just to make the difference more clear to you guys.




The tiles for the background wasn't as complicated to do since there aren't as many different tiles to it. I might talk about those in another DevLog but now I think I'm done talking for today. Have a nice day and keep working hard!

[ShiftDev]

Looking neat so far, what are you planning in terms of gameplay?

[Pixel Noise]

Nice updates - cool to see you guys all so involved and vocal. Looking forward to seeing more!

[Mogensen]

Looking neat so far, what are you planning in terms of gameplay?

Esentially the big objective of AstroScape is to progress through several levels until you reach a boss. After you've killed the boss the game is over.

The main character is able to jump, shoot, walk and use a jetpack. Using these functions the player will guide the main character through the levels. Curently the player has three points of health, taking one damage each time he gets hit by a melee alien or by the turret. There's one pickup that restores health fully and one pickup that restores the jetpack fuel. Both of these are infinite but cannot be moved.

I hope this clarified some of the gameplay!

[saiif1]

Hey everyone, this week i've been working the animation when the player takes damage from the enemy. I had an problem when you walked past the enemy and he attacked you, the problem was that the animation didn't show because when the animation changed to walking animation instead of taking damage animation. We fixed the problem by adding a knock back when the player took damage so the animation could show before it went to another animation. 

[Mogensen]

Here's the fourth update in the graphics department from me, XyaMorph!

Today i've been quite productive to say the least. This update introduces:
-Door Texture along with opening animation
-Bullet Texture (Turret)
-Spike Textures
-Damage animations (main character, turret and alien)

The Door

The door is meant to function as a bridge between levels. The objective for the player is to reach the door that is placed at the end of each level. One the player reaches the door, it will open and the level will end. The advantage of having a door is that it shows a clear sign of where the level will end. There are no other textures similar to the door texture. The door texture will also only be used as an exit door which means that the texture will have no other purposes. There are no clear disadvantages with having a door texture.



Spikes

The spikes are meant to be an additional obstacle to the course of our levels. They deal one point of damage each time they hit you. When you get hit by the spikes you get bounced upwards, that means that you get a chance to escape the spikes before falling down and taking another point of damage. This means that our spikes are not the typical "lethal instant death" spikes that you might see in other games. This makes our game more friendly towards new player who will get an extra chance of surviving the spikes.



Damage Animations

The damage animations are meant to be clear indicators of when the player or the npc's gets hit. We wanted to have solid indicators for these since it was very unclear if you actually got hit by something or if you hit something. Hopefully the damage indicators will be clear enough for their purpose. The only disadvantage of having damage indicator animations is that they take some time to be played. This means that if the player takes damage there will be a slight delay where the animations shows before he can manage to escsape. To pervent him from taking damage directly after the animation we gave the player a couple in invicibility frames where he cannot take further damage for a short while.

The damage animation (for the player) can be seen in this spritesheet:

[Mogensen]

Here's yet another update!

This week i've been working on selecting a font for our game and designing text boxes for our tutorial level. I've also been working on a design for the commercial game cover/poster.

The Font
 The font that we selected (Bank Gothing Md) is currently only used as a placeholder and will later be changed to the main font that we use, which is Upheavalhttp://www.dafont.com/upheaval.font By Ænigma. Upheaval is not a standard Windows font and therfore it is harder to implement into our game. To implement Upheaval as a font for the game we essentially need to make it into a Bitmap. None of the developers knows a lot about how Bitmaps work (both visually and technically) which is why we've had a diffcult time working with it and had to use a placeholder. Even though we can't implement Upheaval in the game you can still se it as a font for our main menu buttons. This works because each menu button is a seperate png file with the text already on it. Why can't do that to the rest of the font related content is simple, because we want to be able to write with the font in our programming software (Visual Studio 2015).

Font Comparison:


Tutorial Boxes

The tutorial boxes are, like the main menu buttons, separate png files. This means that we where able to use the Upheaval font for them, which is very nice! The Tutorial boxes are meant to appear as small text boxes on our first level. When you reach an obstacle that you don't know how to deal with, one of the small tutorial boxes will appear and explain what each button on the Xbox 360 Controller does. Currently we only support the Use of an Xbox 360 Controller in our game but we will implement keyboard compability in the future.



The Poster

Oh yes, the most fun and visual appealing update for this post, of course it's the commercial game poster! The poster is made to showcase our game both as a box art and as a banner. It was made entierly in photoshop with a little bit of help from this guide: http://designinstruct.com/graphic-design/design-a-space-themed-poster-with-photoshop/ I will not be posting which parts that i used/not used from the guide since i really can't remember it all. I will also not explain how i made the poster step by step since that would take ages for me to do.

Anyway, here's the poster (downscaled, high res download can be found below).



High resolution (2550x3300) http://imgur.com/oH1myNp