In our space shooter( which we inconveniently haven’t named yet ) the ships need to have the ability to grow/shrink, because a small ship indicates that the ship has low health and a big ship indicates the ship has high health. Of course the growth of a ship needs to look natural so I made a first attempt on a space ship design, which I looped from small to big. The result is an animation of 28 frames which is displayed in the video above, this is by no means the final design, it is more a test to see whether I was able to create a smooth growing ship. Please comment on the looks and if you know a good name for the game please let us know.

Particle systems are used in games to create organic effects like fire, smoke, dust, liquids etc. The video above shows a couple of effect you can achieve with the particle system we build. But how does a particle system work? Well it is not that difficult to understand. The main idea is that you have an object called the particle system, which generates particles every frame. Each particle has its own properties such as position, speed, direction, size and length of life. Each frame all particles get updated(e.g. their position is recalculated according to there speed, direction and gravity), because every particle has its own properties it can look very organic and chaotic.

Our particle system consists of two classes the ParticleSystem class and the Particle class:

Let us start with the simplest of the two, the Particle class. The Particle class has some variables to keep the properties like particleLife, position, speed etc. The constructor initializes those variable and there is one public method: The update method, when this method is called the particle calculates its next position and size.

The ParticleSystem class has a lot of variables to create all different kinds of effects and a list with references to all particles. The constructor has a lot of parameters to fill the variables with values. There are two public methods, a update method and a draw method. The update method generates a number of particles, defined by the birthrate variable, puts them in the list and then runs through the list and calls the update method in the Particle class. then it runs through the list and checks for each particle if their particleLife is equal to zero, if so the particle is removed from the list. The draw method just draws sprite at the position of each particle.

With this setup the Particle system is pretty easy to implement. You just have to create a ParticleSystem in your main program and call its update method in Update(), so it gets updated every frame, and its draw method in Draw(), to make your particles show up on your screen.

We just started the site and among other things we need a logo but it isn’t as trivial as you might think, there are a lot of things you have to take in account, luckily enough sites cover this topic. These are a couple of rules I found and think you should consider when designing a logo:

• Don’t use more than 2 fonts in your logo. I personally think you shouldn’t use more than 1 font(look at successful companies most of them don’t use multiple fonts).
• Don’t use more than 2 colors in your logo. I think more colors make it look messy.
• Your logo should be recognizable in black and white. The logo might also be printed in black and white form so it has to look good in that case to.
• When designing try to use vectors, so that it is resizable, while still looking good. Your logo may be printed on business cards, but it might also be printed on a big canvas for advertisement.
• A logo should be memorable. This is an obvious point.
• Keep it simple. When designing a logo, some people want it to have a deep meaning, but it is just a bad idea to focus on the message instead of the appearance, because an easily recognized logo is much more preferable than an elaborate logo with bad recognizability.

Well these are nice points, but I learned the hard way that it isn’t that easy to design a logo, just look at the top of the page and you’ll see I’m not that good. But I don’t give up and will make more designs, which hopefully look a little better. If you have more tips please let me know in the comments and if you want to design a logo yourself, please feel free to do so.

Hi everyone, We have recently announced our First project, a 2D space shooter. Currently we are still bouncing ideas off each other and are trying to define a model for our game.

However, because we have a few busy weeks ahead, we will probably not make much progress. The next 4 weeks or so will probably be spend on finishing university projects, seeing this semester is almost over.

If we find the time, and do make some progress, you will be the first to know.

Yours,

The Gobblers

I made a couple of impressions about how I envision our upcoming new game

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