The Krilling

This past semester we, at 310Games, have been working as a part of the Game Development program at Indiana University. Within this company, I have been working as a programmer for the game.

Our game is called The Krilling, and is a role playing game where you play as a ghost shrimp possessing different objects while trying to obtain emotion orbs to get a specific recipe so you can become human again. My main focus throughout development has been with VFX and to test the game for bugs and log it in our bug logger. In this blog post I will go through the two biggest things that I have dealt with while at 310Games so far.

When creating the emotion orbs for the game I was given full creative control over what they looked like besides a few things. They needed to have an emoji on them, and they needed to all be different colors. With this information I started theory crafting what the best way I could do this would be. I played around with the material they were made of until landing on 0.5 smoothness, and 1.0 metallic. I chose to edit the colors of the emojis I was using so that sad was a light blue, happy was green, and fear was the base yellow color. Anger was the base red color for the red emoji so I didn’t have to edit the color for it. When I put the emojis onto the orbs, the face was stretching too far into them, making it very hard to see what you’re looking at. I then edited the emojis to have a lot more background color behind them, which made the face fit very well when looking at it in the game. There was still a finishing touch that needed to be done as they were just not perfect yet. I then got the idea to add a glow effect to the orbs, having the colors of the glow be the same as the colors of the orbs. After a bit of tinkering, I decided that they were as good as they were going to get, and to keep things simple, stopped adding onto it before it became too much.

Throughout development, I’ve been testing the game for bugs, and as any programmer knows, there were a lot of bugs. From the AI movement system making the NPC’s walk in place, to objects being able to be walked through, there was a lot to be done. One of our most prominent bugs that I’ve come across, is the shrimp being stopped while moving from one tile to another. This would happen when trying to move from the grass to the pavement, but was easily fixable. One of the harder areas to fix was moving from the porch to the building. This is because the solution to this was to create an invisible collider as the floor, and delete the one attached to the actual ground. This would make a smooth transition from one area to the other.

The reason why it was harder to do it for the building is because of the shape of the building and the fact that it was all elevated. There were stairs to take you up into the building, which means you couldn’t just set one big collider as the entire ground. The shape was also an issue because the porch area was a lot smaller than the rest of the building, so you can’t have one clean collider for both, unless you wanted the NPC’s to hit their head on it while they were next to the porch.

Don’t forget to keep an eye out for future blogs about The Krilling, or read through the other blogs from our company at 310Games.