Hello everyone! Isabella here with another Castle On Wheels production blog where we will discuss our goals for Sprint 2, whether or not we got to achieve those goals and some of the obstacles we've run into along the way. As a quick reminder, Castle On Wheels is a tower-defense strategy game with RTS elements (more on that later in the blog).

Programming/Level Design 

      Our main goal for Sprint 2 was creating an improved digital prototype that showcased several of our game mechanics. Some of the mechanics we wanted to include in our prototype are: castle movement, ally/enemy spawning, ally/enemy movement, castle health, camera movement, base attack, path blocking and a first look at the game's UI.  Much to my, and Jake's, satisfaction the team was able to include almost all of these features in the prototype.  The features that weren't included have been created, they were just a little buggy to include in a playable prototype. Our programmers and level designers did an amazing job working together and integrating all of the features they were working on into one scene. Here's a little video that shows our prototype: 

        Naturally we ran into some bugs when we were trying to build our prototype. One of the more fun but game breaking bugs was that if you double-right clicked at any point in the game, the camera would fly up into space and slowly zoom back into the gate it was trying to show off. luckily, we were able to fix that bug before our playtest. Other issues that we've encountered consisted of the camera using the terrain as a glide and falling down cliffs as we move the camera around the map and difficulty finding and returning to your castle if you've moved the camera away from it.  We have discussed issues to fix these and currently have user stories assigned to get those fixed at the start of Sprint 3.

2D Art

        While our programmers were busy with working on the prototype, we had our 2D artists drawing away at new concepts for some of the environment in Level 1. The first image of this post is one of three village building concepts that we will use to populate the city. Grace did a wonderful job varying up her designs and i think our modelers will find them extremely helpful. I'll include the other concepts here: 

        In addition to these village homes, we had Alex working on finishing different environment concepts and the level selection page. Working on these simultaneously gives her an idea of the other environment concepts will need for the following levels. At first, we had a difficult time trying to convey the idea we wanted for the level selection screen. To add to this difficulty, we didn't have any levels built yet or even themes that those levels would be based on. Therefore, at the beginning of the sprint I had Jake put together a theme list that included all 10 levels, the idea behind each level and some concept images for them. This document has been extremely helpful for all teams and we reference often when talking about levels. Here are some of the finished environment concepts and a sneak peak at the level selection page: 

3D Modeling

        A main goals for sprint 2 were to complete some of our priority 1 models. The models we wanted to have fully textured by the end of the sprint were the main player castle, enemy goblin stronghold, and at least another enemy model. Our castle is fully textured with minor errors that we will fix up at the start of Sprint 3, however, this user story took much longer than expected. While UV'ing the castle Maya crashed several times, forcing the modeler to switch to Blender in order to properly UV it. We also tried fitting all the UVs on one map which was not possible for this large model. after deciding it would be best to split the UVs onto two maps, our modeler was able to then texture it. This process too the entirety of sprint 2 which put us slightly behind on the asset list but I believe that with the number of modelers we have on the team, we will be able to make up time in sprint 3. Our castle was definitely worth the trouble, check out the final result! 

        In addition to our main, primary model being almost completely finished, we were able to finish modeling our enemy stronghold, grunt enemy, and our slinger enemy. As the producer, I'm very excited about knocking out 4 of our primary models from our asset list. Considering we have 6 types of enemies and 6 type of allied units, we've decided to model 3 different bodies as a base and only adjust their armor to save time and resources. Our modeling team really went above and beyond this sprint. Our final modeler created 3 trees and several rock variations for us to start populating our levels. Overall, if our modeling team can stay at this pace, I believe we'll be able to knock out the models that we need for our game. Take a look at some of our other models! 

Rigging/Animation

        Last but not least, Harrison started on some of the base animations for our characters. Two animations were completed during this sprint: a jog cycle and an idle. We realized that we didn't have a lot of reference for Harrison to go off of when he was animating. To remedy this issue, Jake pulled Harrison aside for about 30 minutes and recorded himself performing the different animations he would like to see in the game. Here's how some of those animations turned out: 

        As a whole, our team met the goals we set for them and in some cases even exceeded them. To help keep better track of our progress we added a point system to the cards we assign to each user. For sprint 2, I assigned 69 user stories with a total point value of 130. We were able to complete 54 of those user stories (98 points) and we have 15 user stories (32 points) left In Progress. At this rate, we will come just short of completing our game before our publishing date with all the features we want. There is one area on the team that I know we could pick up the pace with and will be working closely with them over the course of sprint 3 to get the wheels on the castle moving a little faster. That's it for sprint 2 and from all of us on the Castle On Wheels team, thank you for checking out our game and following our process! 

-Castle On Wheels Team