Week 5 of Game development reflections, Say Hello to my little Friend

We are now done with our Beta, and have begun with our first week of Final. It’s now only two weeks left of Game Development. We had a Beta presentation in the beginning of this week, and let’s just say in the nicest of possible way that… it really didn’t go well. Unfortunately a lot of our stuff wasn’t finished and a lot of our sound and graphical assets wasn’t implemented. This is mostly due to this project being too much for a newbie team to take on. And to even remotely finish all the things in the nine weeks given to us was impossible. We just took on too much. But even if it didn’t go well, at least we have learned some valuable lessons, and we have become much better as working individuals.

So, this is often the part where you start writing all the good things that happened, to even out the bad. But that is a bit impossible, since I personally have had a really tough start to the week. I’ve been terribly ill all week and haven’t been able to help my group with any meaningful work. So I have no assets for this week to write about. BUT, luckily for you (?) I worked with some assets over the weekend and so I’ll write about one of them instead (thought you could get away huh, mehehe).

If you already hadn’t guessed what asset I was going to talk about from the really “secret” reference to The Godfather in the title. So lets make it crystal clear, its about WEAPONS of course, yaaaay! So this week’s asset is the making of the secondary weapons, an important artifact to show the different power ups, aka weapons, the player can use. Here comes the working process for the secondary weapons for the Aquila!

First I had to decided how the ship’s weapons should look like. All I knew was that they were supposed to be 1. a missile launcher, 2. a laser gun and 3. a time-bomb. So I started with making the missile launcher. I googled ship missiles and saw that the shape was often a rectangle, big enough to house a couple of missiles. So after looking around for a while, I blocked out the shape in Photoshop and then started adding some details, I also used a few brushes to make it look a bit dirtied. When finished I had to add it to the weapon wheel. Since it was supposed to be a big and heavy object I placed it under the wheel and connected them together with a thick bolted iron belt.

Done with the missile launcher, I started with laser gun. As it didn’t have any real ammunition, but is shooting laser, I wanted it to be really thin. But I also wanted it to be long, to look a bit like a sniper rifle. Once again I just drew our the shape and then added yet again some details. I used a lot of the techniques that I already went over in my older posts. Now done, I think I might have overdone it with the details. Not because it looked bad, but because they actually weren’t that visible later in the smaller sprite. But as it was done, I added it to the top of the wheel.

And now that all the other weapons was done, all that was left was the time bomb. I decided to go with an EMP grenade design, since the bomb would have a similar effect. I went about making it the same way I did the others. Only I added small lights to it that could blink when used. I also added the bomb to the side of the ship instead of the wheel, since it’s activated with another key then the others. It also wont shoot anything from the ship. But just emit a wave that would knock out the enemies on the ship. So in my opinion, not adding it to the weapon wheel, would probably make it easier for the player to realize that it’s used differently from the others.

Here you can see the wheel how it looked like from the beginning,

here it is with the new weapons on,

here is the time-bomb

and finally, here they all are on the ship.

Thanks for reading, have a nice day and I hope you had a fun read!