Hello everyone! This is Conner Howard again, Producer for Citadel, and I'm happy to bring you another Production Blog for Sprint 2 on our wonderful Rouge-Lite Clicker game. This Sprint, we saw our first playtest of our game, which was mainly focused on essential systems and functions, such as the clicker portion of the game itself, and the movement of the player itself. This playtest gave us extremely valuable feedback on items such as the player's jump, general bugs, placement of word locations, and more! So without further ado, let's jump into the wonderful work our team did, and my experiences with production this Sprint.

To start off, I wanted to jump straight into our updated burndown chart because our team absolutely killed it this sprint! Even with nearly double the points from the last sprint being added to the backlog, the team not only met the increased workload but also exceeded all expectations and still managed to come out ahead at the end of this sprint. We saw the following stats on points for this sprint:

Points Assigned: 130

Points Moved To Verify: 88

Points remaining In Verify: 0

Points Moved To Complete: 88

Points Assigned But Not Moved: 42

This sprint gave me an extremely valuable idea of what the team is capable of putting out and gave me a better idea of how much work I should be assigned, and what I should expect to be finished each sprint by each member of the team. This allows me to plan even more work better and gives me a good idea of where the game should be. With burndown gone over, let's move on to some standout work that was completed this sprint by each portion of the team.

Programming:

Chase, our systems programmer, put the final touches on the procedural generation system, and it is now capable of having completed levels put into the system, allowing for the true random generation of floors each time the player enters the castle. this is a huge achievement as this is one of the main cores of the game itself.

What we see here is Hunter, our mechanics' programmer, getting the basic scene management in place for the game, allowing the player to move between the different areas of the game, including the basecamp, the mines, and the castle itself, where the player will start the run.

and finally, we have Andrew, our AI programmer, who got started on basic enemy movement and attacks. right now it's quite simple, but this groundwork allows there to be a basic threat present in the game and gives us a building block to expand on in the future. All of these are pretty basic systems that the programmers have managed to get functional in the game itself, and it's allowing us to eventually build on these foundations to create something truly robust, and also allows us to start moving on to bigger and better things for the game itself.

2D Art:

Our 2D artist Kevyn was hard at work this sprint, drawing up multiple designs for enemies that will be present in the game, and also the completion of some final art for the shopkeeper, as you can see above. This work proves extremely valuable for our modelers, as it gives them proper direction for how the models should look.

This is here is only one of a few concepts and rough art that was created for the enemies in the game. This enemy, in particular, is the Orc and has us really excited for the visual style and potential of the game that we have so far. This is also one of the last concepts that we needed for enemies, with only one or two more next sprints needed, allowing us to move on to UI art, which there will be a lot of. we're excited to see more work from Kevyn as always.

Modelers:

The first two below are some amazing character models done by none other than Beren, our character modeler, and rigger on the project. Beren always manages to take the art given to them by Kevyn, and really bring them to life. First, we have the shopkeeper, which is almost a 1:1 with the art Kevyn created, and after that, we have the models for the Orc and the Goblins, which really shows off how both Kevyn and Beren managed to create enemies that follow a similar visual style but are extremely distinct, you won't be mixing up these two enemies anytime soon.

Next, we have Bert, who does a lot of the environment models and art, and the work I'm showing off from him today comes from one of the first spells in the game we now have modeled, the firewall. Below is the fireball that gets thrown by the player, which will burst into a wall of fire upon impact. I can almost feel the heat from here! After that we have the model for the castle, that will appear in the basecamp. Bert really captured the destroyed state of the structure, and I love how it turned out, as it's what the player will see each time they go to enter the castle for their next run.

Animation:

Here we have some of the first animations finished for the player character! Our Animator Arturo has been hard at work bring our characters to life in the game, and the player is the most important one to start with. To start, here we have a running animation for the player. We'll most likely be making a few slight changes to this animation in the future, but you could say that it's a great running start!

Next, we have the Heavy attack the player will be performing. Arturo did a great job at really capturing the weight in this attack. we may need to speed it up slightly once it's in-game, but we're really happy with the look of the attack itself.

Level Design:
Finally we have Level Design, to Start, Our level designers have been doing an amazing job on turning out level after level, following the templates that we give them, and with so much variety and creativity going into these levels, we're really confident we'll end up with a very unique experience each time you play the game. The first photo is a group of 4 different levels that Branden created, and the last two photos are a few levels that Jonathan created. we're excited to see these levels filled with enemies, traps, treasure, and more!

All that I've shown in this post is far from all of the work that our wonderful team managed to complete this sprint, this doesn't even reflect half of the work completed, and each time we get together to work on the game, I feel such a wonderful and strong presence of passion from our developers, and it makes me extremely excited to see this game reach the end of development and really come to life.

As a Producer, this sprint really taught me a lot about work management on a team and showed me that I have a lot to learn in the department of predicting work output. our team completed an astounding amount of work this sprint, and they both showed me that I not only under assigned them to work the last sprint, but over assigned some of the team members this sprint as well, and moving forward, I'm really going to strive and aim to find a good balance so that too much work doesn't spill over from one sprint into another. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you in my next post!