Hello everyone, my name is Tyler Huff, I am the Lead Designer for rogue-lite game, Citadel. I am accompanied by my co-lead and producer, Connor Howard. This is going to be the first in a series of development blogs and with our first sprint coming to a close our team is very excited to show their work and discuss design decisions that act as the foundation of our game. For information on the production side of the game, please feel free 

As a team of eleven students at California State University Chico, we are working together to ensure the game is in a complete and polished state by the end of our 14 weeks as a team. 

Citadel is a rogue-lite dungeon crawler utilizing clicker elements to provide the player with a steady source of progression. The game is broken up into two main components; first is the castle which serves as the combat area for the player, and second is the mines which serves as the clicker mini-game where the player can receive their steady gold flow.  Whether the player is taking part in exploring or working hard in the mines they will always be able to work towards a goal of upgrading their mines or their character itself!

Concept to Creation:

In order to guarantee a unified vision of the game I had designed in my head, I had to begin by finding concepts for my artists to work with.  Getting a feel for how the characters and world should look and feel was critical for the success of our early development. By going for a stylized feel to enemies, the terrain, and the player character the modelers were able to get a lot of freedom in their early designs. Additionally our team of programmers had a very specific list of things we needed to accomplish before we could have our first playtest.

The Feel: 

For our first playtest to get us the information we knew we would need we had 4 primary jobs to accomplish

1) Create the tools needed to procedurally generate a dungeon layout using rooms predesigned by our level designers

2) Create the mines to allow the player to experience the clicker elements for their progression

3) Give the player a character that they can control, move around, and attack with

With these three things in mind we set off to work with creating our game.

Starting with our procedural generation, we were able to create a layout that allowed the pre-designed rooms it spawn into an appropriate grid order.  This has set us up to be able to create a boss room and player starting room and then have an algorithm run to create a critical path.

Our player should feel like they can move pretty quickly throughout a level. While there are thicker flooring and walls that the player will not be able to pass through, there is thinner platforms that the player can move through of their own free will. This is going to be a critical part of some aspects of level design moving forward with the project.

Finally getting the mines operating in a way that the player can earn gold and buy upgrades was a necessity. If the player does not have a good way to earn the gold they need to purchase the upgrades that they want then the game systems might feel too overtuned.

The Look:

For our look we are going for a more fantasy feel in order to accommodate a better range of enemies who all can act in their own unique way. The fantasy setting also lends itself to the world of magic, giving the player options for magic and traditional melee combat also allows for a wider variety of playstyles as well as randomized options for the player to make the most out of. 

Our game is also implementing a lower poly feel allowing our small team to create a larger number of assets more quickly to help speed up the production process. 

For our player character model I wanted us to go with a design that felt more ambiguous as to their identity. Starting with a cloaked figure felt like the best start to our game as we aim to hopefully add customization options that will allow the player to change the looks of the robes, and potentially even reveal the character underneath!

That has been the highlights of design in our first week. I am excited to keep you all updated as our project moves forward.