Hero Level Paper Map

Boss Battle Reference/Analysis

So for my boss battle I wanted to do something like a mix of Bowser from Super Mario World (Where he throws things at you) and Raphael the Raven from Yoshi's Island.

The elements include:
 - Throwing/dropping something at the player. (Bowser)
 - Getting faster with each hit w/ visual cue of getting faster. (Raphael)
 - Moving about the 'room' in a specific pattern. (Bowser & Raphael)

Fight Layout:
 1. Boss Appears, boss music begins.
 2. First phase of fight, the boss moves around in a simple back and forth motion. Occasionally throws out bombs to damage player.
 3. When the boss is at 50% health, he dissappears in a fake 'dying' animation and returns as the final phase.
 4. Final phase; New music starts, boss throws more bombs and moves erratically.
 5. Boss dies, player wins. Yay.

Videos:

Raphael's Fight:

Bowser's Fight:

Prepro - Arena (Island Arena)

Theme: 
   The theme I want to go with for this level is a tropical island. It will have typical tropical flora, as well as a color scheme that reflects your usual 'tropical' things.
Location: An island in the ocean. The arena is on this island.
Time of day: Mid afternoon, a bright-eyed, bushy-tail sort of mood to get from it.
Color Scheme: 

Visual Trademark: The giant volcano that has a snake sprout out of it.

Inspirations !! :

Isometric Paper Map:

 

Thumbnails: 

 

Attract Trailer - Cam Cook

Attract Trailer: Blur (2010)

So the game I chose to write and find a trailer for is a game called Blur.

Why do I think this attract trailer is great?
-It has a lot of fast paced action that follows the cars, which makes me hyped to play it.
-It shows the things you can do to mess with other people while racing, as well as car physics/mechanics.
-It shows us the levels that we can race on in the game.
-It shows us other cars that we can pick to race as.
-It shows us who even made the game as well.

As far as I know, this is made with in-game footage (just different cameras) because when compaired to game-playing footage, sans UI, the effects and battle mechanics are the same.

I think the music choice fits this attract trailer as well because it's somewhat of an earworm and it would probably catch my attention if I passed by the cabinet in an arcade.

Particles; With video!

Hello everyone, this is my blog post about my particles!

This is my first particle: A large swarm of bugs that impedes where the player is going and makes it somewhat difficult to navigate through since there's so many of them. As I said in my research, I'm basing these off of the swarms of locusts/bees that you can find in nature.

Here is the texture:

It's a very simple texture, made in photoshop with a custom bug brush for random bits of them being everywhere. If there's anything I learned from this, it's that one whole 'creature' in a clustery texture tends to work a lot better than a bunch of little bugs on one texture.

Here's the setup for the swarm particle:

It's a simple sprite emitter with a ribbon data emitter also attached to it, so that the bugs have little light-trails that follow them around, since they are glowing bugs.

Here is the second particle, the smaller bugs that swarm around the explosive barrels, as well as on the checkpoints, and also on the alternate shortcut path!:

As I mentioned with the other particle, one simple big creature in the middle tends to work a lot better with the type of particle I was going for, so it's what I'm going to do in the future.

Here is the setup for this particle, he is very very simple:

They fun things to do with this particle is the orbit and the initial rotation rate, as it makes them look very silly and friendly to look at.

Here is the video of these particles in action!:

Bug Swarm [Research ; Programming]

So for my level (and barrels) I want to do a large swarm of bugs that can slow down the player, when they're not exploding out of the barrel.

I've looked into these types of swarms before when it's something like a starling flock, but the bug swarms are much different. Many people think of locusts or bees when they think of a swarm of insects, so for research purposes I'll be using locusts as real-world reference and also showing videos/photos of them doing their swarming behavior.

I think I want this to be a GPU particle, with an orbiting module, a small ribbon data to imply the directions that the bugs are going, and also a small light emitter to somehow imply the glowyness of these bugs that are infesting my barrels/level.

I'm not sure how to work the texture into a blueprint of the swarms having the ability to push things around, but I can probably look up a few tutorials on it.