Hey everyone, Sam Boydstun here to report another successful sprint bringing more polish and refinement to our game, Builder's Brawl. Its been a turning point sprint where the semester is fully under way and we are beginning to run in our development. With one major playtest under our belt, I'm excited to share with you the direction our game is taking and the feature additions we have made. 

The Three Builds: 

Builder's Brawl was fundamentally a game about building, using singular planks, and fighting, using simple abilities to impact other players. Deep into the last development phase we realized that we would need a bit more gameplay to really bring the game to it's full potential. Over the course of the summer I devised a few different strategies to add to our game, and I came up with two differing builds. One build would involve the idea that there is a limited number of boards to build with at a given time, we will call this simply "Limited Boards," and another build that would involve three different sizes of boards that players could possibly pull from the pile, labeled "Differing Sizes." Both builds are different in their presentation but both try to inspire gameplay that forces players to fight each other (the brawl factor). This sprint, we underwent playtesting to figure out which build connects most with our players.

To start off, we had playtesters play each of our three builds, Limited Boards, Differing Sizes and a Combo build of both combined.  For me personally, the Combo build was hypothesized to be the most successful. It both inspired competitive play over there being few boards for players to use and there was an emphasis  on differing sized boards being pulled creating an "event" like feeling. Larger or smaller boards are worth double points, so we assumed that when those were pulled, players would gravitate towards fighting for them.

For clarity: 

Limited Boards is a build that is one less board for each player playing, and the pile despawns when those boards are already out in use in the world, either carried or on the ground. The pile respawns when the number has been reduced back to the range it should be. 3 players = 2 boards. One player will always be without a board, thus creating conflict.

Boards of Differing Sizes is a build that incorporates 3 different sized boards a player can pull out of the pile. Large boards which are equal to 40 points, medium (normal) boards which are 10 points, and small boards which are 30 points. A player can still pull an unlimited number of boards from the pile. Movement speed is also effected when carrying a board of a larger or smaller size (Slower/Faster). This is meant to create a "struggle" system where players are fighting over large slow boards and dashing to attack players with small ones.

One of the more interesting notes is the contrast between Differing Sizes and Limited Boards. Differing Sizes was rated much higher in the (4) category than Limited Boards while "LB" for short dominated in the category of (5). It leads us to believe that there was something missing in Differing Sizes that just slightly depressed our playtesters. Combo build, the one I had believed to be great, completely flopped in comparison. As our first playtest on the three competing builds, we received a ton of great playtest data, which I will share below. In the end however, it was clear we would need a greater testing on the Combo build and the three overall, so we've scheduled another playtest coming in the next week that hopefully will bring about double the responses that we saw here (21).

Here with these questions, we wanted to weigh our player types against the overall feel of what they each wanted to do with the game. Of our players, we found that a majority wanted to kill each other as both their main goal and their way to win the game. Previously we had explored this gameplay and had found that some players just want to build, and thus us as developers we should not remove their player type from the game. However in this playtest the 'builders' seemed like a large minority. We will continue collecting this same data in the next playtest and compare.

Programming

Moving along with our sprint accomplishments, our programming team worked tirelessly to create our three builds while also creating a completely new camera to be used universally. Above is the Limited Boards build, which demonstrates that only 2 boards will be allowed for players to pull, and then none more. In the play tests we both despawn the board pile when there are none left to give clarity to the players, and  there is always 1 less board then there are players playing. The figure in the top right is just for testing purposes and is not visible to players usually.

Our programmers completed this and the other build in time to have a large triple build playtest. Furthermore they completed a full revamp of the camera system, applying a professional camera program that will be used universally across our levels. This will bring the game's presentation into a realm where it is the same every single time someone loads the game.

The Art:

Our modeling objective in this sprint was to recreate some our own main models and update them to a more professional style. This started with our character model (below) and very easily one will see the drastic change from the top four compared to the bottom picture. We were under using a ton of polygons and now our character finally has everything he might need to succeed (like knee caps!).

Moving further along into modeling, we were focused on providing our sixth level, the mushroom jungle, with some assets so our level designer could begin to populate the level and formulate an overall environment. We completed rock cliffs that will be used all over, and some of the main assets like mushrooms and mushroom variants to put all over the rocks and taller stalks. 

Level Design: 

Our main focus this sprint for level design was to bring in the assets we had already refined from last sprint and this mostly focused on the river level. 

We now have a front row of trees that have an animated sway to them, giving more life to our level and we have a new river texture with visual foam effects included. On top of that, we refined our river platforms in the last sprint, and brought them in along with our new river boulders. Overall the level also underwent a re-texturing that brings it's art style into a cohesive presentation.

The Animation: 

Finally in this sprint, a ton of animations have come through the blockout phase to be finalized and pushed to the project. Our focus in animation was to provide a complete personality for each one of our color characters.

Blue = Scared

Yellow = Clumsy

Red = Tough Guy

Purple = Joker/ Trickster

With this initiative in place we forged forward in putting their personality in all of their animations. Also its of note that we are redoing the physics in Builder's Brawl and are adding a ragdoll effect to collision (which will be touched on in the future) so we are having the animation team create standing animations for each of the personalities

None of these animations have been ported to the new character model, but we hope to have that done within the week as the rig and weightmapping remain the same. A new run animation was also created to give our characters a better, bouncing frolicking feel. 

Until next time,

We hope you've enjoyed reading about our Sprint 3 progress and are looking forward to bringing you more updates in the future. This sprint in many ways is a turning point for us in deciding a future of where Builder's Brawl will go. Big feature changes have come in and been tested in this sprint and we will have an even clearer picture after this next coming week where we undergo another full round of playtesting. Sound is finally coming into the game starting Sprint 4 and overall we are very excited about the 'feel' changes coming up like ragdoll collision. 

From everyone here on the team, thank you, and we will continue 'building' forward to polish and refine our game.

-BB Team