Hi, welcome again to my design blog. I'm Vivian Overbey, lead designer on Entoworks, a lightweight strategy/tactics game about steampunk mechanical bugs. for a bit more context you can check out my first design blog. 

Sprint 3 has come to a close and a lot of great work. You can check out the producer's blog for that here. This blog focuses on the design of the game and how it progresses and shifts through development

Sprint three didn't have too much really change in terms of design. Most of what I did was improve/expand internal documentation. This includes some more descriptions for the biomes and how they look, and the games overall UX among some other stuff. 

One of the more substantial documentation updates was the new state machine model for the game. initially the game' turn system was planned to be unit by unit. every unit would have a speed stat, and it would go unit to unit regardless of their team for their action. This has been changed to you go, moving all of your units, then the enemy goes moving all their units. 

That state machine looks something like this.  Adding the ability to select a unit then act with them will likely be easier to understand for the player, and simplifies unit stat blocks, though under the hood the state machine is a bit more complex. 

The other more note worthy documentation update is the aforementioned biome descriptions.

The games levels take place in 1 of these 12 biomes. assets are being created within the context of these environments so to help the level designers and environmental artists I put together this reference image. It pairs the Biome with a small mood board, overall description, humidity/temperature, color scheme, and user story.  This serves as an aggregate of some other documentation on the biomes along with some new info in a more readable format. 

The last significant piece of documentation was the aforementioned UX. 

This serves as an overall guide to the flow the player experiences through the game. the player will start on a start screen, then they can check out the credits, go to the settings menu, and start the game from there. the player will be loaded into the upgrade loop of the game where they can manage their units. navigation through this part of the game is pretty freeform, its a menu with a lot of tabs. the player will load specifically into the tab that shows their team of units when starting the game. 

From the upgrade loop the player will have access to the settings menu, the ability to go back to the start screen, and the ability to move into the combat loop. once the player's in the "Gameplay" box, they are experiencing the above state machine for turn order as they play through combat. The player also has access to the settings menu during combat. when combat is over the player gets dropped back into the upgrade loop

When the player wants to exit the game they can navigate back to the start menu to exit. the game is saved when the player completes combat and when the player exits to the start menu from the upgrade loop.

Thanks for reading, there is a new build out that you can check out, it should be attached to this blog post. A new build will be comeing out every two weeks a bit before these posts.

Looking ahead to sprint 4, there are a lot of plans for design shifts, so the next blog should be a lot more interesting