Hello everyone! I’m Conner Howard, the Producer for the rouge-lite clicker game Citadel, and this is my third production blog for our game! In this Sprint, there were some apparent problems that had been present throughout production so far that truly became apparent to me, after showing off some of the awesome work done by our team this sprint. I’ll be discussing what it was, and what I’ve done to try and solve this issue moving forward.  

To start off, I’m happy to show off our burndown chart at the end of Sprint three.

We saw an increase of points to the board as usual, but not as dramatic increase as last time, as this time around, we have a good idea of what needs to be in the game, and we were able to use the backlog I had build much more effectively this time around. The team has done an awesome job staying on pace, and we even saw an increase in productivity once again, putting us well ahead of schedule based on the current points on the board, and as a result, I will likely need to work with our Game Designer Tyler to find more work for the team at the end of development

Points Assigned: 137

Points Moved To Verify: 111

Points remaining In Verify: 4

Points Moved To Complete: 107

Points Assigned But Not Moved: 26

Programming:

We saw a lot of great work from our programmers this sprint. Some highlights include Chase overhauling the AI system to support more advanced movement in the form of an A-Star system, and also the creation of our minimap system! As you enter new rooms, the minimap reveals that room's information. We also have Hunter, who programmed a bunch of the item upgrades we’ll see in-game, including the double jump

2D Art:

Our artist Kevyn got a start on UI art this time around, with buttons, in particular, is started. Kevyn spend a lot of time figuring out the style that will be used for buttons in the future, and we are very happy with the results. We’re excited to see more UI art from Kevyn, and there will be plenty of it!

3D Art:   

We saw the start of models being made for the upgrade items we’ll see in-game, with what you’re seeing here being the compass and the spell stone from Beren, along with a new enemy they managed to model out; the Flying eyeball. We also saw a very important item being modeled by Bert, the chest, which will contain all the upgrades we’ll see in the game.

Animation:

Arturo, our animator just about finished up most of the player’s animations, really helping bring them to life while they move around and explore the castle, including jumping, falling, idling, turning, and landing. There’s a lot of nuances and work that goes into animations like these, and he did a fantastic job.

Level Design:

Jonathan and Branden once again had a curveball thrown at them, as seems to be the theme with the level design portion of this game, but they once again took it extremely well. From now on, we will see levels drawn out with annotated maps first before being created, and we also adjusted what levels will be made first, in order to maximize the potential of the random generation system. You can see the first set of maps done here and the final bit of levels created before we moved to make this decision.

Now, let's talk about the biggest issue that came along with this sprint. Before now, the way we had been building the game was not very well planned out, and it resulted in our Game Designer, Tyler, picking up far more of the slack than he should of. This is my fault, as I should of properly delegated the team to help more with the creation of these builds, and up until then, we didn’t even have dedicated time as a team to come together and work on anything but the build of the game specifically. With this issue more clear than it ever had been before, I moved swiftly to remedy it. The team now has a formal meetup time every 2 weeks over the weekend, to work on any upcoming builds for the game, and these meeting times are mandatory, ensuring that we have everyone on the team there to help complete the build, resulting in it getting done not only faster, but better than ever, and taking some much-needed pressure off of Tyler, giving him more time to do design work instead.

And that was Sprint 3! Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, and I’m excited to see the state of our game at the end of this next sprint.