Citadel - Production Blog 1

Share this post:

Hello there everyone! My name is Conner Howard and I'm The Producer on a game we're calling Citadel! I'm working with Tyler Huff, the Game Designer and my fellow lead, as well as a team of 9 developers. Citadel is a Rogue-Lite dungeon crawler that uses clicker elements to provide players with a steady source of progression in between runs. Like all traditional Rouge-Lites, Citadel uses a procedurally generated dungeon layout and it also has full freedom in stat build diversity to help keep the player interested and engaged. For this game, we'll be using agile development, with the goal of having a new build every 2 weeks, or every "Sprint" as we call it. We will be doing 7 Sprints for a total of 14 weeks. Our Team is made up of 11 people total including myself and Tyler, and each Sprint, I'll be here to review the work we completed, and my experiences with being a Producer. Now with our first Sprint just finished, I'm happy to hop straight into showing you what our wonderful team has completed so far!

Programmers:
Our Programming team is made up of 3 people: Chase O'Connor, Hunter Lawrence-Emanuel, and Andrew Nave. Each one of them is quite talented at particular types of programming, and they got an awesome start to production in this first sprint. Andrew will be focusing on lots of the menus and enemy AI, Hunter has been tasked with things like scene transitions and anything having to do with the player, and Chase's focus will be on the game's random generation of levels. Each one of them has a bit of overlap into these different areas, and thus far they have been extremely collaborative, being a great reminder of the fact that a team's greatest asset is each other. I'm extremely excited to see more of the programming that comes out of the three of them in the future, and the work I'm showing here is only a part of the great things they accomplished as a start to the development of the game.

Player Movement and Attacking (Hunter):

Level Generation Template (Chase):

Gold Generation and Storage (Andrew):

2D Art:
We have 1 2D artist on the team, and his name is Kevyn San Antonio. Kevyn's work will act as a huge influencer on the look and direction of the game, with his concepts and rough art driving the look of the models we create, and he'll also be the artist for all of our UI elements and background art. He defintely has his work cut out for him, but he creates great work, and is very receptive to feedback from Tyler, the Game Designer, on the direction and look he wants for the game. With so much of Kevyn's work being present in the game in so many different ways, I'm excited to see all the unique and varied creations that will come from him.

Shop Keeper Rough Draft:

Protagonist Rough Draft:

3D Artists:
We have two 3D Artists on our team, Beren Franklin and Adalberto Ortega. Beren does all of our character modeling, as well as the texturing and rigging for them. To say the least, they’re quite talented. Adalberto is also a talented 3d Artist, who will be focusing on most of our environmental models and their texturing, to help make our levels come to life. The both of them started this sprint absolutely swinging, with some amazing models and textures, and with Beren nearly completing the very first rig on the project, which already lines up actual animation work for our animator. The work I think speaks for itself

Shop Keeper’s Tent (Beren):

Player Model work in progress (Beren):

Minecarts (Adalberto):

Animation:

Last but certainly not least, we have our one Animator, Arturo Chavez. Arturo’s work is unique in the sense that if I’m not careful with how I plan out work for Beren, Arturo may end up blocked, as Arturo can’t animate without a rigged model. But for this first sprint, this wasn’t an issue, as Arturo needed an idea of what he will be animating before he can even start, rigs or not. So this sprint was mostly reference gathering for Arturo, and there will likely be plenty of this in the future so that Arturo never starts working with a rig without a good idea of what the end product should look like.

Player Run Reference:

Player Jump Reference:

Golbin Walk Reference:

And that wraps up the work summary and the introductions to our team. To close off this post, I want to discuss just how crazy this first sprint was for me, as it was filled to the brim with lessons learned on my part. This is the first real big project I'm managing, so working with this many people comes with adjustments for both assigning work, planning a backlog, and formally working with a designer. My biggest issue by far was work assignments. While I had a backlog more than prepared, I wasn’t willing enough to assign more work, resulting in not as much getting done by our talented team, despite them being more than capable of doing more. Moving forward, I must plan out more work per sprint for my team, to ensure that the game gets done on time at the end of these short seven sprints. Time is going to fly by faster than I expect, so I have to buckle down fast and keep my team on track. With that, here's our very first burndown chart, that’s going to look very different in the next sprint I'm sure. Signing off!