Production Blog 1

Hello everyone, welcome to the Stumblebumps Unite producer blog. I’m Donovan and I’m excited to show off some of the amazing work my fantastic team has done in this first Sprint of ours.

Stumblebumps Unite is a competitive local multiplayer platformer where you play as the Stumblebumps and race against your friends. This game is based on the Game Jam by our designer Michael. In this version of the game there is also an arena mode that will allow you to face off against your friends in a last-man-standing style game where you compete to see who will remain in the arena.

 First off, I wanna give a huge shoutout to my team for doing so much just in this first sprint alone! I’m happy that we’ve gotten as much done as we have in just 2 weeks. Our kickoff was a little rough but they were patient with me and I want to thank them for being understanding of the struggles of being a lead.

For this sprint, our goal was to get some of the basics for what we would need in terms of 3D assets, player controllers, and level design for the different levels we would end up having. This way, we could have many of the necessary assets of our game in our levels before playtesting, adjusting them based on level design, and allowing room for our programmers to get different parts of the core gameplay loop functioning. 

3D Models

Our modelers quickly got to work with many of the different props and even the main character of our game, the stumblebumps (which are super adorable by the way). They are little plushie dinosaurs that are made of a felt like material with lots of different colors that the players will be able to choose from.

Along with those, the team created a multitude of different props that we would use to create the environment for the levels. Many of these were interactable objects or just objects that would add a layer of immersion to the experience of walking around a child’s room as a tiny toy. We really began starting with what was in our asset list, but we also tried to prioritize which assets would be in the levels that our Level designers had created. We are basing many of the models off of games like Little big planet and fall guys since that’s the art style we’re going for. The game takes place all within a child’s bedroom as the background, so many of the props we’re going to have throughout our game are going to be based on child’s toys like legos, plushies, blocks, dolls, and things of that nature. 

Level Design

As for the level design, I had each of them create their own annotated maps for different linear races that we would have throughout the game, each of them having their own style and obstacles that the players will have to overcome. What’s cool about all of them is that they all have unique objects that will make them all feel different from eachother, so if players can feel like they’re running across different kinds of toys. Since the stumblebumps are pretty small, you’ll be using many of the toys that we make as platforms to jump, dive, and try to avoid drowning in.

Level designers also created Blockouts of their own levels in Unity to playtest and get the general feel for how their level would play out. Obivously not all the assets that are going to be moving are moving yet, so it’s more for general feel at this point, but it also allowed them to make whatever early adjustements were needed.

Programming:

This sprint Martin did a significant ammount of work to implement our player controller that would be used for the rest of the game. This was a crucial step of the process that allowed us to test for the scale of the assets that we’d be making, but also to allow the level designers to test their blockouts early so that we can get a sense of how the controller should feel. He also set up the GitHub repository so that everyone would be able to add their assets and make changes to the game

UI and other stuff.

Lastly, we had christina, our UI artist, begin sketching out the UI wireframe and began the research to create her own font that we could use as the base for the rest of our UI designs for the rest of the project. That way, our game will have a unique identity for all the UI that will be popping up. 

But that’s all for the first sprint! Most of the basics have been tackled by our aweosme team already, and this sprint we’re working on new things like the Arena mode sketches, importing models for the current levels, Audio, and animation. But that’s for next blog!