AETHERBANE — Joshua Christiansen

AESIRBANE

Summary

In this norse-inspired Scifi shmup Fly through the realm of Asgard to challenge the gods and any who might oppose you, thus earning yourself a spot at valhallas tables. Developed over 8 weeks halftime by a team of 10.

Responsibilities:

Enemy Designs and Bullet Patterns
Enemy placements and movement patterns
Boss Design
Playtesting and tweaking.
Level Implementations through "Tiled"

Design:

Aether bane was a pretty run of the mill shoot ehm up. The orginal design featured the player changing between two distinct souls, each representing one half of a partnership fighting together to earn their rightfull spot at Valhalla. Unfortunately due to time constrains this feature was eventually cut.

Thoughts and Reflections

One of the most fun things with Aetherbane was re-imagining some of the traditional norse gods in a Sc-Fi setting. Not only was it interesting from an art perspective, but also from a world building perspective, to ensure that the bosses core ideals were reflected in a mordern setting, and then how to represent this into shmup boss mechanics.

My favorite example of this was Heimdall, traditionally the gatewatcher of bifrost, and weilder of the horn "Gjallarhornet". We decided to push a music angle on him and turn him into "Disco-Heimdall" were the player would have to defeat him in a dance-off to gain pasage over bifrost.

The entire fight was designed with this theme in mind. So the first phase would have heimdall "dance" around vertically shotting projectiles in such a way that the player had to match his moves vertically to deal damage and survive. The Second phase had the player dodge projectiles while Heimdall followed the players "dance-moves" by matching the players movement verticall. In between these two show offs, a discoball was descend from the sky and force the player to do an intermediate dance around. .

Level Design Pre-prod Document for Level 3.

Early documentation and concepts for the different upgrades planned at the start of production. This was later cut due to scope.

Group Acomplishments

With only a point-and-click under out belt the scope and nature of the shump where a significant step up. An aspect i think we greatly underestimated when we made the initial plans. As such the original scope and planning where quite abit out of proportions as to what was realistic. When we began realizing this we managed to cut the game down significantly and resize most of our planning into something that was way more realistic and reflective of our actual production enviroment. Realising our mistakes and redeeming them before it was completely too late, is something we definetly can be proud of looking back.

Group Obstacles

With the only previous group project being the point-and-click which was so rudimentary in nature that level design didn't work in editor for that project, the shmup was a serious step up, with programming having to create and supply tool for the first time to level design. This was a tremendous learning experience for both disciplines. As it required a strong line of communication between the two groups to ensure the tools where developed in such a way that they filled the games implementation needs. From level design it was a great excersice in formulating which functionalities are needed to complete the level design process, whilst trying to stay realistic. There is a fine line between unnessesarily timeconsuming minor convience features and gamechanging design tools, and that distinction isn't always that obvious.

Furtheremore this was the first time i had ever worked in a tool, where i couldn't just lookup or google solutions, but had to realy on the programmers to figure what went wrong whenever something went wrong.