Hello everyone, I'm Billy Thao, the Producer for Elementalist. The Elemental Studios Team is excited to share updates and the work put into our game that will eventually become a Local Co-op beat 'em up platformer that rewards cooperative play and mechanic expertise. 

Elementalist is a 2.5D CO-OP vs AI beat ‘em up platformer that allows players to pick their element of choice and play with friends to overcome winding levels and dangerous foes. After defeating an area, you get to upgrade your player in various ways from movement options to ability modifications. In Elementalist, you must think fast and work together in order to overcome the obstacles in the way.

With a team of fifteen student developers at California State University, Chico, We are putting our all into this game with a time constraint period of four months. We are proud to show off our sprint 1 work to you all and provide the you all with updates after each sprint!

Sprint 1:

The 2D Artists this sprint were focused on getting the basis artwork for elementalist. This meant many concept art were created and references were gathered for the art direction of the game. Our talent 2D Artists worked tirelessly on providing high quality art.

Here are some of the concepts that our 2D Artist, Michael Keith created during this sprint.

Michael also created some concepts for the background of our levels which provides the base environment for the different biomes we have for our game.

As for the modelers, They all worked on creating modular building pieces that will allow the level designers to piece levels easily and precisely with precise measurements worked out beforehand. Here are a few pieces of different textured modular building blocks for our levels.

These were modeled and textured by Brandon Uenaka and Josh Reyes.

We also had modelers working on the first elemental character for our game. Our Modeler, Vanessa Villegas started working on modeling a Low-Poly ninja player model. She also worked on UV'ing the model for textures and did a rough texture pass on the character model.

As for our Animators, Which consists of Miranda Arango and Kakari Boateng, They worked on the basic animations for the base movements for our characters. They created Dash, Jump, and the electrical ability dash animations. They also created effects for the base movement animations.
Kakakri worked on the special ability animations and the base effects for the character animations.





As for Miranda, she worked on the slide dash animation and the jump animations.




As for the Level designers, which consists of Theron Howard, Trevor Torres, and Jackie Crosswhite, their job this sprint was to create level concepts and blockouts of those concepts. Each person create different levels prioritizing which elemental character was the best fit for the level.
For example, Trevor created a level where the electric character thrived more than the others.


These first few levels are geared towards mechanic learning and teaching the players how to utilize the player mechanics efficiently while challenging the players ability.

Jackie on the other hand also worked on concepts but he also created a layout of the World Hub where many levels would eventually be built into this layout. The design of the Levels was multiple themed worlds that has many 'rooms' which make up a themed world. This is an example of a world layout.

Theron was responsible for creating larger rooms and creating rooms with many mechanical utility in mind.



As for the Programmers, which consisted of Ryan Dangerfield, Alex Olah, and Austin Myer, They worked primarily on the foundations needed for the core features of the game which iincludes: Player Movement, Scene Transitions, Local Co-Op play. They all worked together solving different issues which came when scripting for multiplayer and different mechanics. Overall, many of the problems were solved and created the basis for the entirety of the game.
Down below is just some clips showing the different mechanics and how they work currently.

Basic movement:


Wall Jumping:


Multiplayer Support:


Room Transitions:


Overall, Sprint 1 went fairly well! Fifty-Three User Stories were assigned and Forty of them were moved into verify then to complete with thirteen assigned but not moved. Everyone worked hard and coherently when needed to solve any issues that came up. As a Producer, I am proud of what we were able to accomplish in Sprint 1 despite the many problems that surfaced due to unexpected time loss before production began. Team Communications were a bit iffy but cleared up after the sprint was completed. Everyone did their job and did a great one in providing the best of their abilities to create the basis for Elementalist. We're all excited as sprint 2 has been underway and development continues.

From everyone here on the Elementalist development team, We thank you for checking out our first producer blog and sprint review! We look forward to provide and show more content in the next upcoming weeks and are determined to work hard on this project to bring you all a wonderful co-op experience! Next for sprint 2 is getting our first prototype up and running with the mechanics and test levels working and implementing any changes if necessary. Anyways, thanks again!

- Elemental Studios