Hello, my name is Courtney, and welcome back to the fourth production blog for Clay Striker! To give you a little 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 fix some of the level design issues we encountered during playtesting and fill out our first level with models. One issue with the level design was that all of the bunkers shot at the player, which made it more difficult for the player to shoot the targets. We were able to fix this problem by varying the directions the bunkers shoot, with most of them arcing across the screen. As both the rearranging of the bunkers and the inputting of assets were assigned to our level designer, he was unable to complete both tasks so he will be putting the models into the first level next sprint for us to show during our next build. 

Now, let’s take a look at everyone’s awesome work!

Modeling

Our modelers got a lot done this sprint! Jerrod worked on texturing all of the assets for level one and did a great job making them look realistic. As there was no material available on Substance Painter or downloadable for free online for pine needles or birch wood, he improvised and it’s hard to tell that they are not supposed to be tree parts! He also worked on a rotting pumpkin model, with four different degrees of rot that all convey the idea extremely clearly. His skills in both modeling and texturing for organic assets have been a huge boon to this project. Michael spent most of his time this sprint on the set piece of the game, the house on the hill. He did a great job making this huge, detailed house look antique with the architectural features he used.

2D Art

Lily worked a ton this sprint getting all of the marketing materials done for the game. She created a really cool cracked target icon for the game’s application photo as well as made a very detailed poster for the game. There will be some minor tweaks coming to the poster in the upcoming sprint but she made great progress so far and we’re excited to have just about all of the 2D art for the game now completed! This upcoming sprint, she will be working with our programmer to implement some of the art that was put on the back burner while our programmer was working on the features they attach to, such as the level select and pause menu. She’ll also be finishing up just about our last 2D pieces for the game, the credits menu and the leaderboard. So come back and take a look at those in two weeks!

Level Design

This sprint, Patrick worked on adjusting some of the bunkers for level one of the game according to player feedback. He changed the direction they shot clay targets to make the tutorial easier for the player. The bunkers used to shoot toward the player which made it hard to hit the targets as the arc made them travel up and then down the screen at a rate too fast for the player to understand. In the next sprint, he will be adjusting the rate at which the bunkers fire targets so that there are no more than two targets on a screen at one time. Now that all of the models for the first level are finished, he will be adding them to the level next sprint.

Programming

Owen did a great job, as always, this sprint making a pause menu and the level unlock system. With the main mechanics of the game finished, shooting and moving on-rails, Owen worked on mainly important quality-of-life features for the game along with helping Patrick figure out how to use the on-rails mechanic in the game and the bunkers. The player can now pause at any time and go back to the level select, main menu, or resume the game. The player will also unlock the next level after getting a certain number of points in the first level. Next sprint, Owen will work more on the UI and transitioning between screens as well as VFX and helping Lily get her 2D assets in the game.

Conclusion

Overall this Sprint we had 62 points assigned and completed a total of 48 of them making our current velocity 37 points/sprint. Our goal next sprint is to fill out the first level with assets and get started on the second level. 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!