Hello everyone my name is Isabella Gentile and I am a producer on the game Castle On Wheels! In this first development log we're excited to show you the main concept about our game and how far our team has come in this first sprint. Before we jump in, here's a little background on the team. We are a group of 16 students from California State University, Chico in the Computer Animation and Game Development program. Our task this semester is to turn our concept into a ready-to-play, published game in the span of 4 months. 

Castle On Wheels is a single-player game that turns your classic tower defense game into a tower offensive, real-time strategy game. As the player is controlling their castle around the map, they have the ability to  spawn units and use different abilities on their journey to push those pesky goblins back into their caves. After completing a level, the player will be rated on how well they did and be rewarded in coins based on their performance. The player may then use their currency to upgrade their stronghold and continue to march forward. And with that, let's move on to the work we got done this sprint!

Programming

Before the semester started, our lead designer Jake Gildea and one of our programmers Zach Nusserdorfer created a prototype for the game. This prototype demonstrates castle movement, enemy spawning and gives the viewer an overview of how the game will work:

In addition to our prototype, we let programmers plan out UML maps for all the features that we would want to add to the game. One of the features that was updated this sprint was enemy spawning and giving level designers the ability to change how many units spawn and what that unit will look like.

For our next sprint, our goals are perfecting the castle movement and NavMesh system as well as given the player more user-friendly camera that is easy to control. Some of the other features we would like to implement is improved ally spawning and a win/loss system for the game. 

Level Design

For this sprint, we created 2 levels in the form of annotated maps. One level is set in farmland and the second level is set in a forest. Our goal for levels is to break out from a boring plane and bring some elevation to our game. In addition to our level maps, we had the level designers create an asset list for us that we will pull from for our 3D modelers. Here are the annotated maps for those levels 2 and 3, since level 1 is showcased in the prototype. 

2D Art

Considering we are still figuring out what we would like our UI to contain, we had our 2D artists start concept work for our environment as well as our title screen and the player's castle(which happens to be the image at the top of this post). We want the aesthetic of the game to be low poly and kind of wonky looking to go with the theme behind our castle on wheels. Luckily, some of our 3D modelers are skilled in 2D art as well so we were able to concept out our main ally unit character as well as 3 variations of our enemy units. 

Here's an image of the environment art we made:

 Modeling

During this sprint we spent some time gathering images for a mood board that we want our modelers to use as reference in order to keep a cohesive look to our game. We designated one modeler for characters, another for enemy buildings, one for allied buildings and our final modeler will be working primarily on environment models.  I feel extremely lucky to have such a large modeling team and look forward to all of the fantastic assets they create! Here are a couple of models that we started this week (from top to bottom: castle base wheels, character body, character armor)

Rigging/Animation

We have one animator/rigger on our team and we are grateful that he has taken on both roles. Together, we spent the majority of this sprint working through tutorials and getting him used to rigging his own models. Starting sprint two we will have him in full swing animating 3-4 animations for our allied units. Here's a cute picture of the pose he chose for his first rig: 

We assigned 62 user stories this sprint and completed 48 of them, leaving 14 user stories in progress. With that, we conclude our first Production Log for Castle On Wheels! From everyone here on the team, we would like to thank you for checking out our page. We hope you stick around to follow our updates and watch our game unfold before your eyes, or at the very least, become a silly tower offensive game that will keep you on your toes. Our goals for our next log are to have an improved version of our castle movement, allied spawning, new levels and a layout of our level selection map in addition to a fully functional prototype that showcases all of our main features. Stay tuned!  

-Castle On Wheels Team