Hello everyone, once again, I am Sam Boydstun and I’m back with another development blog tracking the progress of our game, Builder’s Brawl. The team is super excited to announce we've produced our first digital prototype to great applause from our play testers! With one playtest under our belt we've found a great amount of pride in the project and can’t wait to move forward with more iterations.

To recap the last development blog, we introduced the framework of the game in taking our base concept sketches and making them a reality. Our character model was finalized along with the boards that players will use to make their bridges. Three levels were annotated and blocked out, along with completing the camera that will be used on each level. As well,  we storyboarded four animations. On the programming side we finished the board placing and the UI framework along with basic movement. The groundwork was laid, and now we are building upon it!

Moving on to Dev Log 2 -

In this two week sprint some of the main art pieces for the game were finalized and put down in place to give our game it’s art direction. I’m most excited about the completion of our menu (seen above) and the Builder’s Brawl flag (below). We wanted to continue on the same track with the Red/Blue clashing theme, and this concept has influences going forward all across the game. Its something we can really stand behind, and the team definitely already is picking their favorite of the two. 

The Snowy Mountain Level:

Our concept art has been huge in laying the groundwork for our level design, and in this development sprint, we wanted to concept another level that involves more environment hazards for the player. The outcome was the “Snowy Mountain Level” that involves ice holes in the beginning of the map that players can push each other into, and an ice lake filled with icebergs that they must build across.

The key point of this map was to introduce obstacles in the “gap” which in this case is the half frozen lake and the obstacles being the icebergs. For the first time players will have to build around these obstacles rather than towards them, and it introduces another layer of difficulty to the building process. Each level we make is intended to feel unique and challenge the players in different ways, and we feel that this level will fill one of these niches through blocking obstacles.

The Volcano: 

The main set piece of our second level is now under construction, the deadly volcano. The concept behind the level was to have players build across the mouth of a very, very active volcano. (Its an understatement to say these builder's really get the worst jobs.) Every so often the volcano will boil and explode, killing any players who happen to be crossing the planks across the mouth. Another obstacle to an  already dangerous fight! 

The Board Pile: 

As one would expect of two amateur clumsy builders, they are extremely messy. The pile that they retrieve their boards from should accentuate this fact and our modelers were kind enough to drop all the boards together in one giant mass. I'm sure the builder's themselves won't mind one bit. 

The Modeling Bottleneck: A Shared Assets Story

Early on in development, I quickly realized that Builder's Brawl as a whole had a very serious issue facing it, a modeling bottleneck. With a team of fifteen students, we have only two dedicated modelers who are tasked with both creating and texturing all the models they make. Also, with five levels already on the books, we needed a way to figure out a process in which we could realistically populate and polish these levels in a four month period. The fix? A shared assets list. 

Creating a shared assets list limited in many ways the different creative designs we could have in the game, and restricted us to focus mostly on natural environments. This was a necessary sacrifice however, and in the process we can set ourselves up to succeed. The shared assets list includes things like rocks, boulders and trees that will each receive their own custom texture per each differing environment. In this way we cut down on the models we have to make and can still populate the level with objects that fit the scene and don't look repetitive. 

The Programming Works: 

The Game Loop

The backbone of Builder's Brawl has been progressing along nicely, and in the creation of our first digital prototype we were happy to achieve the biggest first step of the project, a gameplay loop. Players can now progress from the start menu to the level select screen where they "sign in" with their controller, and then start a level. From here, we have the board placing system fully implemented and working, although buggy, and we have a simple push that players can impact each other with. This simple push lays the basis of our combat in Builder's Brawl and just these two mechanics, building and pushing were met with great feedback from early play testers.

 Finally, after players lay down all their boards and reach the other side, we have an end screen that then takes players back to the main menu. Also in this playtest we implemented a respawn and environmental effects such as the river sweeping the character away when they fall in. 

Board Placing Finalized

Respawning

River Effects

Animation: 

Victory Pose 1 Blockout

One of the greatest accomplishments of this development period is that the character rig is done! Finally our three animators can get down to work capturing the feel and movement of the clumsy builders. They have begun full scale work on the run animation, an idle animation and a run while carrying a board pose. Over the course of these last two weeks they have storyboarded and blocked out many of the movements from running, jumping, pushing, victory poses and building poses. Here I wanted to share the some of the final block-outs and build anticipation for the animations coming down the line. 

Victory Pose 2 Blockout

Nailing Animation Blockout

Its my great pleasure to end this development blog with a hearty thank you from the Builder's Brawl team! We are pushing forward into very exciting territory these next two weeks with major changes hitting the game from art style to full fledged animations, and serious gameplay changes based on feedback we received. We are looking forward to showing you all the work coming down the line, and really demonstrate how powerful yet flexible this team is. 

-The BB Team