Hello once again, I'm Sam Boydstun the Lead Designer of Builder's Brawl, back to deliver an exciting update on the ongoing development of our game.  We are just over the half way mark of our semester long development and have changed course and direction in this sprint! Its exciting to announce our changes and their impact on the game, along with a ton of beautiful tuning, art additions and finally, some animations!

Bring in the Brawl

As the idea for Builder's Brawl was created and molded, it was believed that a two player head to head competition could be enough. It might be enough to capture the feel, the struggle over another person to victory. However, now just over half way into development, we realized we could go bigger. We could endeavor and strive grander with our game. And so we did. Builder's Brawl is now 2-4 players, opening the gateway for players to enjoy playing together in any odd combination of small group that they can muster together. We decided that to make this drastic change now was necessary, and really why not, lets embrace the chaos!

This change has opened to great feedback that has all been positive. On our end as a team and a team leader myself, its been amazing to see players laugh and fight with one another over the struggle happening on the screen. The game has finally evolved to be the BRAWL that it could of been. Also other than having to rebuild a few systems, we've relatively been unscathed by production delay due to swiftly making this change now.

The New Player Colors

The Respawn Arrows 

Terrain Texturing 

All of our maps in Builder's Brawl are made to look like a greater world and we are happy to announce that terrain painting is finally in full swing. One of our 2D artists has hand made each of our ground textures ranging from grass and dirt all the way to snow and sand. She is now working through and texturing each of the terrains and they are coming together nicely. It was really important to create all of these ourselves as to nail down our art style moving forward. 

The Snowy Mountain 

Builder's Brawl's 4th level, the Snowy Mountain Level is now in full game play testing and balances out our roster of levels by adding in dangers around the board pile and further teaching players to build around obstacles. In crafting designs, our focus was all around balancing space specifically combat space and building space. How could we combine the two on each level is one of the first questions we ask ourselves. Here we chose to break up the open combat space in the beginning with more action elements enticing players to do combat early. 

Secondly, the lake at the end will eventually have icebergs forcing players to build around them. Thus this will be our first level teaching players to build around obstacles rather than to them. 

This level still needs to undergo heavy tuning and testing, but we are looking forward to having it refined in the next two weeks. A key point of development is that though we are seemingly pushing out levels, we should not lose the idea that each should be perfect before we finish this semester. 

Programming Advances

With four player integration being implemented and completed, our programming team is moving on to some of the smaller touches in the game. We wanted a few accenting camera shots to both start and end each match to highlight each player involved and the player who wins the match. When you call victory and get to the other side first, the camera will now zoom and circle on you as you dance around in jubilation. 

A point bar was put in last review and it has undergone more changes to make it clearer to players on who is leading in points and who is losing. A big point for us was to limit the amount of UI on the screen, especially making sure that no points are tallied directly in view of the player. To add information we chose to have the faces change on the bar hoping to have this be a simple yet effective addition. 

The Railroad Assets

As we now are in the back half of our development, beautifying our levels is of big importance on our list of tasks. Along with texturing the terrain, we are also populating the levels to have a prettier look and a unique theme. We've finished up the main assets on the railroad level this development period and they have added a whole lot more style. The level is based as a dark and foreboding broken bridge and we are hoping to further nail that feel down with our assets. 

Broken Railroad Section

Withered Tree

The Great Animation Boom

Over this last development period, we've completed a total of twelve animations! This great boom is a result of finally having all of our animations ported from a broken rig to the now updated and finalized rig. Everything from the way the character runs, to impacts from other players is now in the game and being put into the matrix. Through our animations you will see very exaggerated movement and we hope this captures our light hearted style and feel. 

Charge Impact - Player will fly through the Air during this

As a development team we wanted to avoid creating a rag doll effect on the characters and are attempting to mitigate this through our animations. Thus if the player is impacted from the front or side for instance they will have an animation that throws them in that direction. 

Board Slam / Board Run

Squash from Board Slam Impact

One of our personal favorite animations is the one above. Board slam  has a very distinct feel to it and we wanted to highlight this even further in that when you smash the other player they flatten hilariously. Crash Bandicoot was our main inspiration, and this animation really captures our style and our hope is to bring some laughs to the players. 

From me and everyone at the Builder's Brawl team we thank you for reading our Dev log 4! Our team is hard at work moving into tuning and refining our product. We are overjoyed to have a game loop that is fun and enjoyable, and now are looking to make it perfect in the time that we have. Looking forward, we have a ton of art and modeling assets coming in this upcoming development period, a build that fully incorporates our animations, and an overhaul on the feel of some of our levels. These next couple periods we are determined to nail the feel of our game and share it with all of you. Thanks again!

-BB Team