Hello everyone and welcome to the development blog for Entoworks! 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 seventeen people and the design of our game is led by our Lead Designer Vivian Overbey. We intend to create an exciting top-down tactical game for you all to play by December 5th. So let’s get into it!

But first, what is our game? Entoworks is a lightweight turn-based strategy and tactics game where players will be challenged to best utilize their team of up to three entogear (robot bugs) to beat the enemy entogear on a variety of unique maps. As a mix between Fire Emblem and Pokemon, the maps will be broken up into tiles for the units to move on and they will have elemental types and stats like luck that play into combat. 

We hope that sounds exciting, so now let’s show you the work! 

Modeling

Our modelers hit the ground running with all kinds of small, but important, models this sprint. Additionally, one of our modelers, Michael Insley, created some textures for us in Designer. He made some amazing dirt floor and grass textures that will be used in the Grassy Plateaus as well as the Crystal Caverns. Many of the models made this sprint were very basic but will be used as upgrade materials and are therefore vital for this game. Additionally, our modelers made some great set pieces that will be used in the Crystal Caverns and Grassy Plateaus to make the environment more interesting.

2D Art

Our Concept Artist Lily Burgess got to work this sprint concepting the bee entogear which is next on our development pipeline. She did a great job researching honey bees and creating something familiar, but also clearly robotic. She added some fun elements like a honey hatch to the end of the bee and took it from sketch all the way to ink this sprint.

Level Design

Our Level Designers Micah Landeros and Ryan Inthavong did an amazing job creating detailed asset lists for their levels and building out the first few levels of the game. Ryan worked on the tutorial area, the Grassy Plateaus, whereas Micah got to work on the second area, the Crystal Caves. Our Game Designer created an extremely intuitive tool for building out levels in tilesets very easily in Unity so the images below showcase the tool.

VFX

Our Programmer Christian Smith helped organize the programming team this sprint as well as started putting together some very enticing VFX. He started with a glowing ball that will be used as an attack and will change colors depending on the element of the entogear. Then he worked on the smoke VFX for when an entogear is low on health and dies. These are both super important VFX that will be happening most often during the game and Chrisitan did a great job making them alluring and easily modifiable.

Sound Design

Our Sound Designer Patrick Yang made some amazing sound effects for this sprint. He worked on the attack and damaged noises that the entogear will make. He did a great job of making them sound metallic and robotic as well as full of energy. 

Throughout the course of this Sprint, we had 124 user stories assigned and were able to complete 63 of them. Our Lead Desginer Vivan gave us a basic prototype to work off and now we have laid the groundwork as far as concepts and research go so we hope to implement our first entogear in the next sprint. We will continue creating more models and levels throughout the next sprints and hope to add VFX and sounds 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!