Hello again everyone,  Sam Boydstun here to deliver another update on Builder's Brawl as we close out on the waning days of our semester long development. We are happy to announce that the game is now feature complete, and the team is hard at work at getting all of our features hooked up and implemented. In this update I'm also excited to share a burn down of our production progress and even better news that the game is slated to finish on time for our December 15th deadline .

The Hazard Work

With all of our environmental hazards completed, this sprint was focused around implementing them into the game and providing our players with another gameplay feature to avoid than just each other. Things like creating hazard fields was important to make sure that players would be impacted by the effects we created and gameplay would be improved from just player to player interaction. 

To accomplish this task we created a VFX proximity check based on the location of the nearest player, and fired off the hazard that was set up closest to them. This is set up so it can be run on any level and now we have a guarantee that our players have the chance to get hit by our effects, rather than them previously possibly occurring off screen.

Visual effect "fields," like the lightning one above on the railroad level, now are populated throughout our levels and add a new dimension to gameplay. On top of creating these hazards we've also cleaned and tuned every visual effect, and are happy to report they all are in their finalized state ready to ship. 

The last visual effect to be finalized this update period was our fireball on the volcano level, which now has it's death attached which even lights the player on fire when impacted. We believe this type of humor fits perfectly within the framework of laughing at your friend as they burn to death from the fireball you just pushed them into. Our volcano level unsurprisingly is now is our most dangerous environment that builders must fight through.

The Interface Overhaul

A focus heading into the end of development was to redo many of our user interface and menus. With the universal UI coming in last sprint, it made sense to strip away and rebuild many of the pieces that were also looking aged. Our main menu logo was one of them shown above with the old menu title on the lower left. On top of the main menu logo update, we took a long look at our menu as a whole and decided it was needed to clean it and make its look less cluttered.

The top image is now the new updated main menu screen while the bottom is the old screen. A ton of work went into cleaning the pictures of the characters to fit well against a black screen and orienting the new universal UI that we had made to fit well in a compact format. Overall we are very happy with the way it turned out and it feels a whole lot less cluttered. 

A big complaint of our testers previously in past playtests was that our control screen was not polished and was also incorrect. We fixed those errors and even added a toggle that will show players what each button does when they have a board and when they don't have a board. This is important because the same trigger buttons are used in both states, and we wanted players to know that their main controls comes from only a few simple buttons on the controller. 

The Final Two are Complete

One big addition this semester to Builder's Brawl was our two new levels, the Mushroom Jungle and Bidwell Island. Both levels are now finalized, fully fleshed out visually and implemented into a playtest schedule.

Bidwell Island

The focus for this level was to provide the only open gap map for players to fight on. Many of our other maps have platforms or obstacles in the middle in which players must built to, or build around. This one however has a clean open space between two islands in which the builders seemingly have a straight shot to get across, if it wasn't for the pesky spears of the island people. The beach theme is a completely new environment from what we have done before, and gave us a great opportunity to test out some spear throwing physics along with a more sunny vibe.

The Mushroom Jungle

The Mushroom Jungle is our only map to only have one "arena stump" platform adorning its center gap and also it is our only map that heavily uses emissive lights to light the scene. We really wanted a unique area for players to fight in, and with acid clouds falling from the massive mushrooms, we believe we've created it. Furthermore, because of the acid clouds, we created focused lanes in which players must build in that are not easily visualized by the player, thus adding strategy and depth to the map by our use of space. The aesthetics of the level came out really nicely, and our level designer spent a ton of time creating an atmosphere of wet darkness. 

The Burndown 

As we round out our very last month of development, it was an extremely high priority for our development team to come up with a plan of action to get this game done. The focus became to create a burndown that would allow us to figure out if we were going to hit our numbers and complete all of our tasks. The entire production process of creating Builder's Brawl is done using agile development through the medium of cards on Trello.

At the very beginning of development this semester, we had 276 cards in our backlog.  During each of our sprints we completed on average 43 cards a sprint with a 10 man team. The remaining cards we have left for our two final sprints, Sprint 6 & 7, is 61 cards. 16 cards are still in progress and 45 cards left in our backlog. We are going to experience some crunch here at the end but it is doable with our average just barely overshooting what we have left in cards. 

Its important to note that we implemented game changing features to our development schedule in both Sprint 2 and Sprint 4, which gave us our two lowest points of completed cards. The cards assigned in those sprints took almost three weeks to complete, outside of our agile development range of two week sprints and caused massive bleed into the following period. Big features brought us a very up and down development cycle, yet at the same time we are slated to finish our backlog easily as a result of the upcoming Sprint 6. 

Due to the fact that almost every sprint we had cards bleed over into the next sprint, our cards assigned were consistently higher than what we were finishing. We didn't realize this until rather late that our numbers were off and so we continued to push forward, keeping the plates of the team very full. Luckily however, with this burn down and a focus in our last two sprints on completion, we are able to right the ship and finish this game. Sprint 6 is our next upcoming period and we assigned the lowest amount of cards possible to give us a focus on finishing our current tasks and making sure the two lines above come to the same spot. The entire burn down process has been a great boost for the team to see, and for myself as a producer honing my skills for the future. 

Moving forward we are very excited to be able to show off our polished and completed game in only a months time. We are heavily entering our QA phase with a massive focus on bug fixing. The team cannot wait for those to play it and we once again thank you for reading our development blog. 

-The BB Team