Hello everyone and welcome back to the second production blog for Clay Striker! I’m Courtney and just as a refresher, let me remind you what Clay Striker is all about. 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.

Our goal for this sprint was to create a functioning prototype where players can experience the core loop of the game, shooting the gun. We wanted the shooting to feel as realistic as possible and focused on testing that main mechanic before moving on to the level design. This production blog will walk you through our process of creating a digital prototype this sprint along with everything that went right, went wrong, and how we overcame problems.

Now, let’s get right into it!

Modeling 

This sprint our modelers finished the assets needed for level one. Since we decided to do one UV set per level, this meant that our modelers could start texturing. Michael started texturing the clay target and shotgun while Patrick got to work on our station marker flags. These models are most critical as they will be the most prevalent and most interacted with by our players. There was a bit of confusion about what part of a station marker flag was most important, causing the first version of the flag to look elegant and overly complicated. After some discussion, we decided that the station marker flag needed to be simplistic with large numbers so that players could easily tell which station they are at. After some discussion and further revisions, we ended up with a flag that easily conveyed the information to the player. 

2D Art

During this sprint, our 2D artist Lily finished up the basic UI and got started on the mascot of our game, Pat. The final basic UI needed was a level select screen and a pause screen. These were done fantastically well and she got started on our lovable panda, Pat. Pat is crucial to our game because he will help serve as the tutorial giver as well as give basic hints to players during the game. As he is a 2D sprite that will appear in the bottom left corner as part of the player’s HUD, we needed him to display emotion so that he can help the player track how well they are doing during the level. This sprint, Lily got started concepting and coloring the first emotion Pat needs to have: neutral. Most of the time Pat will be neutral and having his design created will make creating different emotions much easier. She did a great job making him look simple and cute so that the player does not get distracted, but also does not mind seeing him pop up.

Level Design

During this sprint, our level designer Patrick got started with a block out of level one which includes stations one, two, and three. He did a great job keeping things organized with color-coded clay target launching paths and paths the player will take. Now that all of the models for level one have been created, Patrick can start implementing them into his blockouts during the next sprint.

Programming

Our Programmer Owen created a simple shooting and clay target-throwing mechanic last sprint which allowed him the time to polish them this sprint and give the shotgun a more realistic knock-back. He also started on a tool for our level designer to easily be able to lay out a movement path for the player. In each level of our game, there are three stations the player moves to and plays at. Each station is situated in an area within the level and as this is an on-rails game, there needed to be an easy way for the level designer to decide where the player goes and what path they take after they build out the level. Starting Sprint 3, our level designer will be building out level one and the track movement mechanic our programmer made will be seen.

Conclusion

Overall this Sprint we had 53 points assigned and completed a total of 36 of them making our current velocity 31 points/sprint. Our goal next sprint is to kick things up a notch and completely fill out level one with textured assets and completed level design so that we can test our levels starting with the next build. The work displayed on this blog was only part of what got completed this sprint and I would like to thank my team for the great work they got done. We hope you’ll stick around and we’re excited to show you what we have in store in two weeks! 

Thank you for reading!