It's been a month

For some reason, we forgot to update our blog! It has been a hot month here in Finland so we have all enjoyed a little time in the sun while it's possible. We also had a vacation week during midsummer. But we are back and we have been busy!

We decided to ditch the swipe movement with physics. It just didn't work for our concept. We instead went for grid based movement without physics. The character cannot jump anymore, but he can climb! This will make it less frustrating for the player to go back up to the base. Venla is in charge of the character movement and while it's still not completely finished, she is working hard to make it perfect.

While on the subject of base, we have added door animation and a pop-up menu, where you can upgrade your character. The menu is still work in progress and will be the biggest challenge for us for the remaining time. The base also fills the players food bar and empties the inventory bag.

Oh that's right! We have an inventory bag! On the lower right-hand corner of the screen, there is a backpack icon which fills up gradually while collecting resources. Once full, the player cannot collect anymore resources and will have to go to base to empty the bag.

Oskari has finished the self-generating sectors in the gamefield. It works perfectly and will generate new sectors when the player reaches a certain depth. Also, the game deactivates sectors if the player moves far enough from them. This way, our game should not overload your mobile devices. Some parts of resource spawning code is still unfinished so Oskari will keep on working with that.

We will keep on posting both in our instagram and on this blog so stay tuned!

A new Wednesday, a new update

A lot has happened in the past week. We have started a weekly introduction series in our Instagram (@polarbeargamesofficial) where you can learn more about our team.

We have planned our resources and Sini already made the art ready for them. Oskari is working his hardest on the dynamic gamefield code, which randomizes the loot in different sectors and areas, while also keeping some loot rare and giving the deeper snowtiles more hp. Our game is going to be infinite, so Oskari has his hands full with writing a self-generating world.

Julia is swamped with animations, background and loading screen/game over screen. We had some great ideas about our animations so we can't wait to see the art she produces.

Jussi is working on the UI and animations code and also created a working placeholder loading screen and game over screen. Both the food meter and health meter are fully functional with finished art.

Venla has been working on touch/swipe movement for mobile and will start working on a main menu soon.

We can't wait to show you more, so stay tuned!

Wednesday update.

A lot has happened! Our game has a logo now, and a working food meter. Also, Venla has almost finished working on touch controls for android. A playable demo will be ready on Friday.

Oskari and Jussi re-planned the game sector management and decided that we are going to go for an infinite, self-generating world. The further you go, the better the loot! Also, some resources will require a specific NPC to use and the NPCs will be hard to find..

It has been a very productive week and we can't wait to show you more! Meanwhile, enjoy our new game logo!

Character animations!

Today we started working on character animations. Our amazing artist Julia pulled an all-nighter to draw us all the required poses for the main character. Now the character has an idle animation and a running animation. See for yourself!

First game physics demonstration

We are ahead of schedule and already made a "playable" demo version, where the placeholder character moves and digs through snow. Hopefully we will get our main character animated at the end of this week. Stay tuned!

Also, go follow us in instagram! @polarbeargamesofficial

Sectordesign coming to life in Unity

Today Oskari created the first three rows of sectors in Unity. The first sector has a working randomizer for loot. The picture is zoomed really far away, to show all the sectors in place. Just imagine there is a small cabin on top of the sector pyramid, in the center. The player view will be zoomed in, so that the player cannot see too far, not even one sector as a whole.

The plan is to add several sector areas for the final game, so that there is a lot of exploring to do. For our first demo version, we will use these three sector areas so that we can start testing character movement.

We are still a little understaffed with Sini recovering from fever and Julia travelling. Jussi and Venla started working on character movement script today. We made a script for the character and enemies and snow with health points.

Two weeks flew by. Here is where we are.

Today we are having a little presentation here in our school about the progress of our project. We decided to share a little sneak peek at some of our presentation to our viewers here.

Currently we are on schedule with our coding. One of our coders has been sick for a week, but we have managed well nevertheless. Also, our graphics designer finished up her last project yesterday and went for a trip for a few days, so we have been a little understaffed the past week. Still, everything is going as planned. We already created a loot randomizer for our sectors and a sectordesign (see picture above). 

Next week we are going to start working on level design and implementing the player character into the level. After that we are going to make the character move with point and click (touch on mobile). Our goal is to have a playable demo version of character movement on Friday the 8th of June.

Stay tuned!

Blue-eyed beast at work

Oskari, our little blue-eyed beast, working on C# code. Magic is happening!

Late night brainstorming.

Enjoying the nature while discussing game development.

Another day, another piece of code

Here is a little gif showing our working space, which is shared with other project groups in our school. You can also see some of our members hard at work!

Official logo

Our official logo is finally ready!