Production Blog #4 - Shapeshift Dungeon

Hello and welcome to our fourth production blog for Shapeshift Dungeon! We have completed Sprint 4 with our third playable digital build and are super excited to share what we've worked on in the last two weeks. The focus of Sprint 4 for us was to listen to and to apply feedback on our base gameplay and to add in a layer of depth through new mechanics and content to our game. We were able to add in some extremely important secondary features and have managed to keep up the pace we had before. 

Through sheer serendipity, we have completed 111 points for the third Sprint in a row. We assigned a total of 168 points and finished the Sprint with 27 left in progress and 30 in assigned. This is very exciting for me as a producer for two reasons. The first is that we came back from Spring Break with our momentum and we seem to have found our pace. We're just under 10 points a person per Sprint. While I would like to see us rest at just over 10 per person per Sprint, I also understand that different team members have different availabilities and that we have different members step up each Sprint. I appreciate those who step up, to allow those who cannot the opportunity to breathe when they need it if they are overwhelmed with life circumstances or other classwork. I'm also especially grateful for the fact that we have different team members excelling each Sprint. The second part that excites me is that we ended the sprint with about a dozen points reassigned for minor adjustments just prior to creating our Sprint Review. We could have been a dozen points ahead this Sprint, showing growth, but would rather get each of those tasks done just right for the game overall. I also value consistency over short term growth as a producer, as I've found that consistency leads to long term growth anyways. In either case, these are numbers we are very excited to see and, as always, we are very grateful to the team for their fantastic efforts in this Sprint.

Modelers:

From a production perspective, the 3D artists of this team are my perfect example of the values of long term consistency leading to growth. Our feedback to our modelers has been to work on increasing communications and to let us know of their progress and their thoughts while working on the project. Thanks to the extended efforts of all three modelers taking this feedback to heart, we've increased communication and been able to find problems early and to fix them quickly. This has, in turn, sped up the modeling pipeline and led to an overall increase in the quantity and the quality of the 3D assets for our team. While Devin's work continues to be fantastic for the Sprint, I would like to really commend Chance and Jose for taking initiative to reach out with updates on a more regular basis. They've both shown great improvements and we're really proud of their work this Sprint.

Slime Enemy (Chance)

Goblin Enemy (Jose)

Gem (Chance)

Bowling Ball (Chance)

Bridge Tile (Jose)

Sand Tile (Jose)

Blood Splatter (Jose)

Mushrooms (Chance)

Programming

Our programming team repeatedly proves themselves to be hard workers and ambitious learners with every Sprint. In Sprint 4, we mainly focused on expanding systems to offer more depth to the gameplay. This means adding lasers, creating a progression system, and new enemies.  Joe's flexible new AI system has allowed us to quickly prototype and produce new enemies, starting with a crystal that shoots laser beams at the player. He also set up a stationary turret that can fire the beam as well for the level designers. Alex put on his designer hat and created a quad root scaling function that progresses the player's stats as they drink more Stats potions. He then a fire status effect and gave us a fire wand tool to set enemies on fire. It's really fun. Justin stepped up a lot this Sprint and did a whole assortment of tasks that we really appreciate. Thanks to him, the player now has the ability to loot gems from enemies to purchase equipment and potions from a shop. He also worked on the laser functions and cleaned up our spawning behaviors for enemies. 

Purchasing an Item (Justin)

Laser Beams (Justin)

Fire Wand (Alex)

Laser Attack (Joe)

Crystal AI (Joe)

Level Design

Our level designers continue to serve as a multifaceted bastion of excellence within our team. They start each Sprint by combing through Analytics, Game feedback, and level-specific feedback for an prioritized actionable list of design changes to the game. They then present it to us and make a case for what needs to be changed. This process has brought the quality of our levels up so much and is a process I will be using in every project moving forward. In addition to refining their levels, Marc and Branden have been creating a few more levels for us in each Sprint as well as some great particle effects. Staggering the level creation process has allowed them to use lessons learned in early levels to help shape the more difficult levels. We really appreciate the level of finesse put into every task from both Marc and Branden this Sprint.

Level Updates (Marc)

On Fire Particle Effect (Marc)

Death Explosion (Branden)

Research for hit effect particles (Marc)

New Levels (Marc)

New Levels (Branden)

2D Art & Animation

Our Arts team has shown a lot of great improvement this Sprint in both communication and quality of work. Alexis has found her stride and has really begun churning out item icons for us quickly. She has reached a style that fits perfectly within our game and her art often looks production ready in the first iteration. Sprint 4 was her best Sprint so far and I'm excited to see her carry this into the rest of the semester. Likewise, Tanya has tackled the ambitious role of designing our game UI style. She has given us a lot of concepts for each piece and we're really excited to see the progress that she's made into finalizing them for gameplay. Lastly, Armando has done a great job of getting player animations in for us, which took a lot of revisions to get right. His tenacity and willingness to perfect them is something we greatly appreciate.

Rocket Boots! (Alexis)

Gem (Alexis)

Laser Wand (Alexis)

Bomb Bag (Alexis)

Cooldown Indicator Concepts (Tanya)

Cooldown Indicator In-Game (Tanya)

Idle Animation (Armando)

Attack 1 (Armando)

Attack 2 (Armando)

Run Animation (Armando)

Overall, we had a great return from Spring Break and I'm very glad to see the team running smoothly. It is really cool to see that we seem to have different heroes each Sprint. The way each team member waxes and wanes in productivity to fill in the gaps of their team mates is truly a privilege to experience and it has led to some incredible consistency. We're now getting huge amounts of data thanks to our playtesters and some new analytics tools. Be sure to check out our accompanying designer blog 4 and our newest playable build for more information about that. Thank you so much to our fantastic playtesters and ever fantastic team for an awesome Sprint 4. Shapeshift Dungeon 0.3.0 is shaping up to be a great game.

See you next Sprint!

Arjun Gambhir
Game Producer