Hi my name is Alex Olah, I am the lead game designer for Parasitic. This is the first of many Dev blogs to show off key points in the production of Parasitic. First a quick overview of what this game is a top down turn-based tactics game that allows the player to get progressively more powerful as they kill parasites and explore. My team consists of 10 people with a separate art team also collaborating on this project. More on the team later, throughout this blog I will be outlining some of the key design decisions from the first sprint.

To start off the first sprint I needed to make sure the team knew what the game was so that everyone could be working on the same page. The team on the first day was very open and willing to ask questions which made showing my vision off much easier, allowing me to take feedback from them on how certain aspects of the game could be improved. This led to a very long back and forth with the team and together we crafted a better version of the game I was envisioning. Now all we had to do was make all the pieces of the game easy right?

For the first sprint of this project we laid the groundwork for the entire project, first we started with the main system that are key to the game being functional: the grid, camera, player movement, attacking, AI movement, attacking, turn system, fog of war. This was a huge ask of our 3 programmers to get all of it done in two weeks. As it turned out it was a little much to ask as not all the core systems were done at the end of the sprint. This wasn't all bad, we took extra time to really flesh out the player and enemy so that moving forward we didn't have to keep adding and adding to them, hopefully this will save time down the road. Below you can see the grid system completed with each tile having a small brain of its own with walkable, non walkable, and buff. The buff being a addition suggested by the level design team to make encounters more varied speaking of level design lets talk about their work next.

For the level design of parasitic we want to encourage exploration as each level you start at 0 and need to get stronger to progress. The grid system can support 100x100 easily so that was the cap size as of right now 50 x 75 is the largest level. To start we wanted the team to do some research on there own and come up with a theme for each of the levels they will be working on they came up with a large meadow to start the game, next is an abandoned airfield on the edge of a town, and last a dock on the edge of that town. Each level has a different feel with the sizes of the levels changing drastically as the docks are more level up from combat vs the meadow is level up from exploring. Next I wanted each member to be allowed to express their own ideas in their levels so they made a small list of assets they would need for their level to feel completed. Naturally me and the producer went through each one and picked the key items needed so we did not overwhelm the 3d artist. This team has been very critical of the game's core loop and has enlightened me to some problems that could arise from it and together we have made the core loop more engaging to the player. Below is an annotated map that was made for the second level in the game. 

The 3D art team is 2 members strong and is killing it, they are pumping out so much good work it is amazing. Going into sprint one we had the art style ironed out as we knew that we need to go full steam ahead for this project. Low poly is the style we picked as I love the look of it when done correctly and also it is quicker to make and iterate allowing more work to be done at a high quality. For the world assets we started off with a lot of generic things for a medieval fantasy theme that you would find like trees with many variations of each so that it doesn't look like it was just one thing that was copy and pasted. For our member doing character modeling we managed to get 2 of the 3 playable units done and sent to animation and rigging this is huge with such a limited amount of time to do the animations having them be worked on sooner rather than later is a huge roadblock out of the way.

The art side other than 3D is a little strange as I am not the one directly leading them I have to go through 2 others to talk to the artist. So far that hasn't caused issues and the work the animation and 2D art teams have been great. First the animations are very simple but show life in the characters which is something that I was really pushing for as the games camera will always be looking at the player they should be interesting to look at. For 2D concepts they understand the theme of the game perfectly and are making it hard to pick one one concept for each individual unit. As I am not directly involved with this team I don't have a lot to say other on how the workflow has been the concepts we have been getter are already fully colored which can be dangerous if we don't like any of the 3 so moving forward I will be requesting to see the sketch first before color hits the page hopefully this is future proofing problems.

Overall sprint 1 was a great learning experience for the entire team. I learned a lot from the team and the producer and I got to see how much work is doable for the team in a sprint. Moving forward we have a solid plan moving forward and if everything goes to that plan nothing will have to be cut from the game. A quick look into sprint two shows the team still working at full steam and I am excited to show off more of their work soon for now thats all I have for you. :)