My name is Nathan Beste and I am proud to be the producer for the game Into the Woods. This post and the others to follow are going to help give everyone a look into the development cycle of our game. It should also function as a companion blog to the posts made by Olivia Yee, who is our game's developer! Each post will contain a brief examples of what each section accomplished along with visuals for a lot of our teams work!

The team creating this game is comprised of 11 students from California State University Chico in our Computer Animation and Game Development program! The individuals are assigned different positions dedicated entirely to their selected discipline. We have programmers, level designers, 3D artists, a 2D artist and even an animator working with myself and Olivia to build this game completely from scratch. Every 2 weeks we will have more information posted here so check back often! Without further adieu, lets get into the game!

Our game is titled Into the Woods, and is a dungeon crawling game with a randomly generated map system. In it you play as a witch/wizard in training that has to search the forest over 3 days for their master, who has been kidnapped! Collect items, craft potions and defeat a variety of enemies before your master's time runs out!

Will you step up and recover what you lost, or will you remain lost in the woods?

Pre-Sprint 1: Making a list

A lot of the work that goes into making a game actually happens before you even start the first lines of code! Planning the core game-play loop, assets required for the game and programming requirements are planned out prior to the start of development. These ideas are then broken down into different cards that I use to help direct the efforts of my amazing team. This would be the most people I have worked with on a team since I started school, and I was eager to get to work. This led to us our first sprint!

Sprint 1: Checking it twice

The part of every sprint I look forward to as a producer is getting things going at the beginning of each sprint. This can be difficult sometimes, because my job is to get as much work handed out (and completed) as possible each sprint. This does not sound so bad but consider that each team member should NOT be finishing their work early, nor should they be leaving parts of their workload unfinished until the next sprint. It requires a sort of negotiation with each person and for the first sprint I usually have hardly any idea what my teams limits are. This is not a problem so much as a learning experience, where the subject is each individual. Needless to say they have far exceeded any expectations for their work accomplished and I am proud to show off a few examples here from each department.

Programming Team:  Chase, Paul, JT

Without any sort of programming, there is not much of a game to play. For this reason much of the focus for our Programming team centered around core functions that would allow the player to actually play the game! Our first example is some wonderful work by Chase that shows a functional player controller being tested!

Chase also put together a method for the player to interact with (ie: shoot magic spells at) the enemies we are creating for this game!

This is work is great, but in order for a player to navigate the world, there must be an actual world to move around in. Our programmer Paul was tasked with creating a system that randomly generates a 4x4 grid of map "tiles" for each time the player starts a new game. While the world tiles are not integrated into the game at this point, Paul did manage to create a system that currently looks a little like this!

With Red dots being the end room and Green dots being the starting room, the player will have a whole world ahead of them whenever they click "start". The last component we need for players to interact with the world is some sense of their situation, in this case we had our programmer JT work up a User Interface(UI) to fix that issue. Because the main focus is to have a playable prototype at the end of the next sprint, I had him work on player health and inventory set up first. 

As you can see, this sprint we have laid out the beginnings of an excellent framework for the future of our game. These first few sprints are most important as a producer because what I prioritize will affect how the rest of the development cycle will go. Luckily, while picking some items can be difficult for programming, the same is not always true for other departments like level design!

Level Design Team: Eric, Reggie

There are so many important things to remember about level design, and it can be very easy to forget any number of those things if you have people skip straight to making levels. Much like models and art work, we start designing levels by getting a solid feel of the shape and layout of things. We start by make an annotated  map, and then proceed to blocking them out by creating a scene in Unity and setting up their annotated map there. In the case of Into the Woods we are breaking our map into smaller separate pieces I call "tiles" for the sake of simplicity. Because we have 2 different level designers, I assigned them both a set of 16 tiles that we can then combine at a later date. First we will look at Eric's work.

Annotated map and Blocked out map for a basic room:

Next some of Reggie's work:

Having this game work completed now is of vital importance as we can spend future sprints refining the areas and giving them life by populating them with items and monsters!

3D Art Team: Talia, Erika

Before we get any models made, we need to have some idea of what they should look like. For this reason, I had all the time the 3D art team could find spent on concept art this sprint. Let us look at the work Talia did for the items the player can collect in our game.

These items are great, but we need a world to put them in! Woodland settings obviously have lots of trees and similar, so we have concept art from Erika on how that will look.

It is always really fun to see stuff like this come so easily for our artists! Naturally I want them to get into the modeling phase as fast as possible, but the more important point here is that everything works well for the art style that Olivia has planned out. I look forward to seeing these objects come to life so the player can move around in our created world. But the player model also needs to be game, for that we need to visit our final group!

2D Art/ Animation Team: Daniel, Atley

The flexibility of different team members is key to our survival during the game development process. Playing to the strengths of our team allows us to sometimes accomplish work faster than normal and during this sprint this team helped set us up for future success by accomplishing some really awesome work. For our player character design, we looked to Atley and his really great drawing skill set. As you can tell, he blew us away with what he came up with.

This work is truly wonderful and this character has a long road ahead of them to go from drawing to living model in-game. Fortunately the process of giving our character animations is in good hands with Daniel! While we did not have an actual model of the player ready for animating just yet, we did have some general animations that he has been working on for when we have the model ready. Here is a great example.

This early work for both animations and character designs will allow us to press on without worrying about missing something important down the road. I could not be happier with the progress made here!

Final notes:

While I have acted in a producer role on several other projects, this is the first time I have lead a team this large. It certainly can be intimidating at times, but I have no doubts in my mind about our abilities. This sprint overall we accomplished a lot of work and that was before we had even all settled into our role as team members! During the coming sprints I look forward to accomplishing so much more, its going to be awesome! To my team if you are reading this, you guys are amazing! To everyone else, I look forward to showing you what all we have accomplished in our next sprint!

- Nathan