5sd064 Turning the power-ups into pickup-able items

Hello again, Thomas Härdin here turning back to the power-ups of our game. As I've written about before I had to decide on the functionality of this games power-ups which turned out to be some fairly easily manageable enhancements to the players projectiles when playing in the hacking mode. We did get three of them, a rapid fire function that activates when 8 enemies are killed, a wider shot that you get through pressing a button, same as the wide shot for our orb that obliterates all in its path.

So the whole reason i wrote this backstory is to get to the point in our project where we needed to make the later two power-ups available to the player. I decided that the easiest way to do it was to let the player have more to do when wandering around the office spaces as the spy character, we put out small but highlighted items on the floor that can be called pick-ups. They look just like the power-up you receive on a square plate and when you step on them you gain a charge of that power-up to use when hacking doors. We got there by first getting the art asset done which i took care of myself, I placed it out on multiple locations in the map and then had one of my programmers code the interaction we needed.


The result we have now as seen on the picture above is the power-ups in form as pickup-able objects around the map (highlighted with the red circles). These are visible as everything else in the players field of view and are placed in a manner to help the player where the player needs it most for example before harder levels and such.

I am very happy we got to this point although i would have wanted to get this done earlier in development because time for fixes was scarce after and since i did not have a balanced plan in case this would not work i am glad it did not turn to shit. In that case the game-play as the spy would have been a lot more lackluster than what it is which was one of our goals to prevent. The amount and locations of said pickups might be changed later but for now i am pleased with the result.

5sd064 Designing Map Layout

Hello, Thomas Härdin, Lead Game Design of group Fenrir here.

Today i will be covering something that i have wanted to work on for some time but was unable to due to the status of the game earlier. Namely map layout.

So what do i mean by map layout? Well essentially it is the structure of everything you can move on and interact with in our game, mainly focused on the rooms that the main character spy is moving around in and between. At earlier stages of our game i have been meaning to work with this but i couldn't either due to lack of programmed interactions or lack of art assets to use for it. Lately however i have had the means i need to build the labyrinth of rooms we desired for the game. As a start i put in a bunch of walls and doors to fill out a playable space followed by making some temporare decoration art to make the rooms feel a bit more like an office space, but reaching that feeling still is beyond current state and we aim in the end to make it look like an abandoned office building with dust marks and moving-boxes everywhere.

First of i expanded the two rooms we had to test the function of getting through doors by hacking them to about six different rooms, i made a short path to the end because of simplicity when it came to our presentation we were going to hold, but the end goal is way beyond that. As earlier mentioned i will be working towards a real office space labyrinth that the player has to explore, this way we can meet the aesthetic goal of exploration to follow up our earlier ideas about challenge and incorporating the feeling of doing industrial espionage. Thanks to what we have now in terms of code and art i can easily expand the map to thrice the amount of rooms and make hacking levels covering each door.

These are the past and current situations followed by the future plans, thanks for reading!

5sd064 Thomas Härdin Designing Level Progression

I am back for another update. This time covering our take on level progression. 

Since our, Fenrir's game contain multiple levels in form of hacking doorpads as a spy doing industrial espionage we pretty early in development realised that this means we may very well need to create multiple levels. The follow-up concern for me became the fact that we needed a system for progressing after finishing a level, the player of course would want to move to the next area if they have completed the prior.

The way we dealt with this at an early stage and kept for considerable amount of time was through having a script that triggers when pressing the key "E" on the position where we visually put doors. This launches the player into a new scene tied to the door and you have to destroy all enemy spawners on the other side (right side) of the screen. When you accomplish this task another script tied to the current scene will trigger and launch you to the next room. This repeating itself again and again with new scenes over the course of the game.

Personally i thought this did not really capture the feel of moving from room to room in an office building, nor did it allow the player to move back to earlier rooms to look for things they might have skipped. I wanted the player to have that freedom to roam back and search around, also being able to see the next room in line would be way better to motivate the player to keep moving forward.

How did i solve this? Well to be honest it is not solved quite yet. I had the idea for some time that we put all the rooms you roam in the same scene with doors that opens or gets deleted when you finish the level that door was tied to. My programmers are currently working on it and it looks like this is doable which itself is a success for the player experience in this game. 

I will take it with me that if you make a system that you are not pleased with, dont hesitate to try out changes or you will risk keeping an unsatisfactory model of your game. Until next time!

5sd064 Thomas Härdin Designing Powerups

Thomas Härdin, lead design for Fenrir back again.

We are making progress with the game concept Bullet Hack. A lot of the core is finished, such as movement, shooting, win/lose conditions, etc. Today i will explain recent progress and future plans for powerups. Note that following is based in the mode that is the hacking gameplay.

Lets start at the first powerup. We had some early ideas as a group about different kinds of powerups, for example a multi shot projectile, sweeping laser in a cone or even a bomb covering the screen with its effect. However to have something that met the alpha criteria with at least one powerup and still be something easily implemented and useful i thought we could settle for a rapid fire mode. Meaning the player gets increased fire rate when it is activated, in this case we implemented it through decreasing the cooldown between shots when the player shot with space, so you could essentially shoot faster when spamming space. This was clarified in game with the projectiles changing colour drastically. Also to have an easy time testing with the powerup we bound the effect to a key, in this case "F". It let us use the effect without complications, however the plan was always to have powerups being pick-ups when searching in rooms as the spy character. Who is searching these office rooms for clues and industrial espionage. To continue on the rapid fire powerup, we also had a distinct sound when it was activated for further clarity and feel.

So, i am happy with the first powerup being this simple, we are currently tweaking how long the effect should last and how often you can activate it, this will need visual effects representing cooldown and availability.

Moving on to future powerups, me and one of the programmers has thought out an early version of a double-shot mode, where the player can shoot two projectiles per shot for a duration. Some may think its too much and not that exciting with two powerups just changing the way normal shooting behaves, but there is where the third powerup will come in. My plan for it is to have something that looks like a menacing great orb that you can launch through a separate key and it doesn't change your shooting behaviour but rather it is fired separately slowly moving through the screen from your character to the left and ending at the right end obliterating everything it touches on its way, always pulsating with electric energy.

This is the progress and plans for powerups in our game, feel free to fill me in on opinions.

5sd064 Thomas Härdin Designing Level Difficulty

I'm Thomas Härdin. I study game design with more design specifically and currently i'm working on a space shooter game project with my group called Fenrir

For the past days I've been working on different difficulties for our game, difficulty as in different kinds of levels. Starting off we made sure that we had a base game to play and after we had a player ship that could move and shoot we added enemies who could do the same and spawn objects where they appeared from. This led to grant m
e the ability to change details like spawn frequency of the enemies, in which order they appear and how frequent they shoot. Really good functions for balancing. I spent the mentioned last few days setting up a copy of our project where i could add, delete spawns and change how they worked, thanks to this I've come to a point where i managed to create a fair but not boringly easy basic difficulty and i'm experimenting with making more challenging experiences for the player, this of course will come with some external play-testing since naturally i would have a greater understanding about the game and therefore an easier time beating it.

So, what would an example of the difference between easy and medium difficulty be? Well the way I've done it was with the basic version of 3 spawns which means 3 enemy ships spawning on different lanes in a slow frequency and uneven order. It was not a challenge for anyone in the group to beat. However when i made a version with 5 spawns and slightly faster spawn frequency it actually required considerable effort to beat, that with regards to the fact that i made it and should have an easier time in general than most players. Going forward from this i will have people outside of our group test these prototypes of difficulties to make sure it contains the right amount of challenge warranting if its easy or medium. If this process goes well i can include the hard difficulty as well which is the third and final level version we have planned on as a group so far.