The Brawl Continues.

Hello again everyone, my name is Sam Boydstun,  and I am the Lead Designer and Producer on Builder's Brawl. I had the pleasure of leading a team of talented students creating this game last semester at California State University, Chico and once again I will be leading the game as we trek into another semester of development.  I hope to help build on the success of the first phase of development and begin a new chapter.

It is an honor for any game at our university to be chosen to move on into further development and I'm excited to share with you the changes, polish and features we are bringing to push Builder's Brawl further as standalone  game. Our goal is to provide a fun engaging couch brawler with a building twist that you could enjoy with your friends, elbowing them the entire time as you build towards the flag.

Sprint 1: Polish Time

Builder's Brawl at the end of its first semester of development boasted five levels, three abilities, multiple environmental effects and a fully fleshed menu and scoring system. As we move into the next chapter, our goal is to provide two new levels, two new defining gameplay changes and a host of polish and art refinements. Builder's Brawl will also this time around be completely revamped with complete sound design, and visual effects on every level. In this first sprint of the new semester we focused on prototyping these new gameplay changes, concepting the levels and overall setting our design schedule.

The Details: 

The art direction in our first sprint back was to number one, concept a new sixth level, and two, provide modelers with a direction on refining the look of our characters. A mushroom jungle sounded like a unique concept that we could execute easily, and give us the basis to provide player's with new environmental effects to dodge, say the deadly spores of mushrooms "trees". Also it gives us the ability to provide players with just a single platform to fight over, an arena of sorts. In each of our other levels we've always had 2+ platforms in the middle of the gap and here we can switch things up while also filling a niche in our overall level matrix.

The Visual Effects & Sound:

Moving on in development, one of our biggest focuses was both to provide new visual effects in every level and create a complete sound design. Lucky enough, on the team this time around we have one person each specialized to sound and VFX. Some early effects have already changed the way our levels look, like the lightning below, and the sound effects are being churned out at a great pace. In a later sprint I'm really excited to share some gameplay videos with all of these working in unison.

The Characters & Animation:

After taking another look at our character model compared to the max polygons in our scenes, we realized we have a ton of room to push the detail. With that we are reworking our character model to be much higher poly while still retaining the same rig and weight mapping to not mess up our animations.

Each of our characters has their own personality and now through the models and animations this semester we will be able to highlight them even further.  Animation will focus on bringing each unique personality to the surface with creating new idles for each character to even the way that each of them gets up off the ground when knocked down. We want to give players the opportunity to become connected to their little blob of a builder. Along with providing new movements to the characters we will also start to give our environment some animations to bring the world to life, as seen below.

Towards the Future:

The first sprint gave us much of the framework that we will use for the rest of the semester polishing and refining Builder's Brawl. This is our first test into modifying and bettering the gameplay in an existing game and it should pose a fun challenge to overcome. Our goal is to submit this game in the upcoming Independent Games Festival for Best Student Game and we believe that we pose a serious threat to the competition.

Thank you for reading our first sprint blog and I look forward to sharing more of our progress with you in the future. 

-The BB Team