Production Blog 2

Hello Everyone! Welcome back to the Stumblebumps Unite producer blog. 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.

Our goal for this sprint was to try and finish everything we would need for the first few levels of our game. This included the 3D assets, programming systems, and tweaking of the level design. While this was a hefty and stretched-out goal, we got about 90% of the way there making this an extremely successful sprint in my eyes. We also had about a 250% increase in production compared to the last sprint based on our Jira numbers, so I couldn’t be more happy with the work that our team is doing. Here are some of the statistics:

Points Assigned: 167

Points Verified: 143

Points in Verify: 3 

 Points in Complete: 143 

 Cards Assigned but not moved: 25

Not only that, but we have a couple of new team members who are working on some special things for us, like Sound Design. But let’s get into what the team was able to accomplish.

Modeling:

After some discussion with the level designers about what kinds of assets they would need for their levels, I divided up the workload that we required among the artists to begin modeling props that would be interactable in the levels we have blocked out currently. They took on a lot of different assets this sprint, allowing us to get the levels in sooner thanks to how fast they’ve been working at it and continue to work at it right now. While we didn’t get every single model in this sprint, it is enough for us to begin using them as we would need for level design purposes. The art has also been maintaining it’s Nintendo esc, a childlike style that the game is based on, which I find to be quite impressive considering the assets that we’ve been asking our artists to create.

Level Design

During this sprint, the designer and I talked quite a bit about how we wanted to change up the level of the design process. Instead of having them immediately jump into an annotated map for a whole level and trying to jumble the asset list alongside the assets that they want in their level, we had them go through a new process where they create a one-pager that briefly encapsulates what they want their level “chunks” to feel like. A chunk refers to a section of the level from checkpoint to checkpoint. 

However, this isn’t mainly what was being worked on throughout this sprint. Instead, we had them finish and test their blockouts, Most of this new design work was being done at the tail end of the sprint while a majority of the sprint we wanted to focus on the kinesthetics of the levels that we already had developed.

Going forward, all level design work will be done in this manner so that all the levels will have a similar level of quality while also giving us time to figure out what assets are going to need to be made in the future. This is especially important for the upcoming arena mode that we’ll be making which is going to be a last-man-standing style mode requiring different types of map design.

Programming

The programming side of things got stepped up a lot this sprint with numerous adjustments to the player controller, the implementation of 4-player multiplayer, bumpers, movement adjustments, and interactable props. 

As of right now, our player controller seems to be implemented well enough to begin testing things, but it wasn’t able to get done quite as quickly because of the local multiplayer aspect. I’ve learned throughout the past couple of weeks being a producer on both this game and another game that is a local multiplayer game, it’s a lot harder to implement because of how Unity handles player controllers. We also 

Other:

Lastly, for the other work that the team has been able to do we made more progress with the UI sketching and making that work, we had some more Audio work being done, and more updates to the design documents so that we are all on the same page. 

Our audio engineer started with a few different sound effects that go with the theme of our game. It has a very Nintendo Esc feel to it with some of the plushie squishing sound effects in it that evoke the feeling of games like Mario Kart or Mario Party. The sound effects were also a great addition, having things like bumping, running, jumping, and bouncy sounds will allow us to implement the dramatic elements more into our games.

Overall, I’m super happy with how the team has been doing these past few weeks. It’s been a little bit to get on the same page and for me to know what is required of me, but we’re all learning and I’ve been really enjoying seeing the fruits of our labor come together and hopefully next sprint, we’ll all get to see it with a real test.