Hello Everyone once again and welcome back to the Design Blog for Citadel. I am Tyler Huff, lead designer for Citadel, and want to talk about some big design changes we have made in this last couple of sprints. As this will be our last design blog before our launch and post-mortem there will be a LOT to talk about.

Models

Starting off with models our team of modelers, Beren Franklin and Adalberto Ortega have completed every single asset that I wanted our game to have with 4-6 weeks left in the project from the time of completion. This meant that I needed to come up with enough work to keep these two working for the rest of the period while also making sure not to break the vision I had for the game. This resulted in my needing to reach out to my team for thoughts on what they would imagine. This resulted in our level designers and modelers coming together to come up with some extra ideas. After I thinned it down a bit we had a much more diversified environment to look at.

Additionally, Fungus, Torn Banners, romantic candlelight (for your date nights with the goblins) and more will be strewn about the castle.

In addition to some updates to the models to make the castle itself look better, we introduced new terrain to the camp scene. This terrain has helped to make the scene feel more alive than the "default brown cube" Visually it adds a lot of impact to loading into the scene. 

These additions have allowed our level designers to create the levels as they truly envisioned and has done a lot to make our game look much better.

Particle Effects

What fantasy game is complete without some particle effects? Using some photoshop tools to create a set of PNGs, I have added several particle effects into our game. These particle effects are mostly tied to the spells that the player uses in order to give them a bit of extra magical flavor. As of right now these include the firewall, icicle, and pox spells.

Animation

Our animator, Arturo Chavez, was also hard at work putting some animations onto the models provided to us by our team. For these animations it felt critical that our premier boss enemy, Squiggmar, feel uncomfortable and alien. Thankfully this lends itself well to Arturo's specialty in creature animation. 

Squiggmar's tentacles needed to have that bend and swing that you would expect to see from a squid or octopus. These are notorious for being difficult to animate so we made sure to give Arturo the space he needed to make sure it came out just perfect.

The cream of the crop of our animations so far though is easily Squiggmar's head.

The jaw moves around uncomfortable and menacingly. The eyes scan the room constantly looking for prey while they bulge and pulse. The entire motion is meant to feel uncomfortable to look at and it hits that just right.

Movement

Our player movement needed some major overhauls in order to feel good. After 12 weeks we felt like it was still not quite where it needed to be. I decided it was time to tear it down and build it from the ground up. This has resulted in a player controller that, on its own, feels significantly better than the the previous iteration. The player no longer sticks to walls, the player feels better moving through platforms, and the players jump feels tighter. 

Positives asides, this has brought about some negatives that are impacting the current build of the game as you test it.

Certain aspects of the controls and UI elements (such as the health, spell system, melee system, and certain enemy controls) were tied deeply to our original player script. The player script was just handling too much all at once. I am fully confident that by the end of our 7th sprint and my post mortem post, this will be in such a better spot that it will be all worth it. There are already signs coming through that show just how strong our new system is; it just needs a little more time to develop.

Thank you for your continued reading of our production. As students this has been extremely eye opening, especially to me as a lead designer, and I look forward to talking about my findings in our post-mortem.