Hello everyone and welcome to the development blog for Clay Striker! My name is Courtney Cochran and I’m excited to share all the great work my team is creating throughout the development cycle with you all here! Our team is composed of six people and the design of our game is led by our Lead Designer Michael Insley. We intend to create an exciting on-rails first-person shooter for you all to play by December 5th. So let’s get into it!

But first, what is our game? Clay Striker is an on-rails FPS that aims to bring the realism of shotgun sports to the excitement of arcade shooters. Players will be challenged on courses valuing high speed and precision to shoot down all the clay targets and achieve the highest possible score. You play as Don, a down-on-his-luck professional competition shooter practicing his skills for the Clay Striker Regional Championship. Move from course to course, each introducing new and more difficult obstacles, with Pat your panda buddy coaching you along.

Now let’s get into the work!

Modeling

As our Lead Designer Michael has experience at shooting ranges, his ultimate goal was to create the most realistic-feeling shooting game as possible. We tried to encapsulate this in our first level with models of things you would normally see at a shooting range. For instance, a bunker for targets to come out of, a bench for those not shooting to watch their companions and a shooting house. As some of these models, such as the clay target, were things that most of our team had no experience with, it was a bit challenging at times to communicate what they needed to make. After some digging, we were able to find some suitable references online for all of the props, and Jerrod Luster, our main 3D Modeler, got to work!

2D Art

For the theme of this project, Michael wanted a country aesthetic as shooting ranges are popular mainly in western areas. We were really proud of where our 2D Artist, Lily Burgess, took the simple word “country” with her designs. She did a great job encapsulating the feeling of a shooting range in both her button UI and title screen.

Level Design

Our Level Designer, Patrick Williams, worked very closely with our Lead Designer to create annotated for where the targets should come from and how the “on-rails” part of each level will work. He did a great job taking feedback and fusing that with his design to create some truly fun stations in each level.

Programming

Our Programmer, Owen Gallagher, did some awesome work this sprint creating a basic electronic prototype that gives us a lot to work off of in sequential sprints. 

Our Lead Designer wanted an arcade-feeling camera that is restricted to only about 45 degrees of vision in any direction so that the character can focus on where the targets will be. Owen did a swift job of getting it set up and moved on to the shooting mechanic.

He quickly created a gun that shoots in a small arch, similar to a real gun, and made sure the bullets get deleted after a short amount of time so that they don’t clutter each level. Our programmer also made sure that the clay targets disappeared after being hit and that the player could see the bullet shoot out of the gun to better judge their aim.

Next, Owen moved on to the launching mechanic for the clay targets. This was the final aspect needed for the core mechanic of our game so that players would have something to shoot at. The targets fly out in an arch and disappear after a time.

Our programmer easily finished up this sprint with a score counter which is integral to the design of our game. We want players to challenge themselves to beat their high scores, so they need to be able to see their scores.

Throughout the course of this Sprint, we had 54 user stories assigned and were able to complete 30 of them. We finished an extremely simplistic electronic prototype this sprint, but hope to implement instructions, 2D elements, and level design into our game next sprint. We will continue creating more annotated maps and props this sprint, adding textures to the untextured models created this sprint, and hopefully, adding sound and VFX in future sprints. Our team would like to thank you for viewing our page and we hope you’ll continue to stick with us as we develop this awesome game! Thank you!