Production Blog 4

Welcome back to the Stumblebumps Unite Producer Blog. This sprint, we ventured to get our grand prix levels finished and begin implementing the arena mode levels, but as we’ll discuss we made some pretty drastic changes to these goals at the end of the sprint and changed them into a new mode at the start of the next sprint. Here are some statistics for the team:

Points Assigned: 259

Points Verified: 182

Points in Verify: 0

Points in Complete: 182

Cards Assigned but not moved: 36

Our sprint goal ended up changing drastically by the end of the sprint because of feedback we got from our professors and how we wanted to achieve our design goals. We discussed how we wanted to challenge players to fight against each other more in the levels we currently have, and the solution we came up with is hopefully going to allow us to get that system right.

However, we still focused a lot on finishing up what we had from before and at the tail end, how to reformat what we had into the new system we were going to use. Lets go through how that happenes

Modeling:

This sprint, we had our modelers finish up some of the assets for the remaining sections of grand prix levels and work on some interactable objects for unique levels in the game. One of the coolest ones was the Hungry Hippos which we are still going to use as an “arena” game ruleset. The stumblebumps are going to fight to be the last man standing inside a hungry-hungry hippo arena, and that idea stuck with the team.

Another cool model from this sprint is the dollhouse which is going to act like a race to the top that entices players to sabotage each other. We have been making a few level design changes to try and add conflict to this section, one of which is a jack-in-the-box that we will talk about soon.

The rest of what was worked on were a few new assets to add to smaller sections of other levels and for props. We also started working on cosmetics like the stumblebump’s new shader and we’ll move on to have new cosmetics next time.

Programming:

This sprint we focused a lot on tuning a lot of our backend systems for the game to make them easier to develop with. We developed tools like the level debugger and backup kicker to make the development process for level designers easier. We also worked on tweaks to the menus system and fully implemented the arena mode system. 

One cool system that was finished this sprint was the hungry hippo system, how the mouth moves and has rigid bodies and kill-boxes when they eat the players. It moves on a timer system so that the players have to try and hit each other. There will also be bouncing balls that can be hit so that players can bounce each other around and try to slap them into the mouths

We also sketched out character states so that the player controller is perfected and feels exactly how we wanted it to feel. This has the inclusion of a slap mechanic where the player can press a button to slap other players around. The goal of this mechanic is to encourage players to try and sabotage each other, which we want to encourage more of in our levels.

Level Design:

In this sprint, we made a few new levels that would function with arena mode rules and some adjustments to other parts of the game based on it. This falling ice section is similar to fall guys modes where you have to be the last man standing, forcing players to fight each other for the top spot. Another cool section is the laser maze section where players try to make it to the end of this maze first and hit other players off.

There were also adjustments made to some sections of our level that would encourage players to interact more and have fewer diverging paths so that they’re forced into conflict. For example, these block sections would be moving up and down, but we wanted them to be closer together.

Other:

We had some more UI art finished up this sprint that we will begin to implement into our actual UI in-game. The animators took on some emotes and a slap animation for the new player mechanic. They also worked on the jack in the box which I talked about earlier, an interactable prop that will allow players to sabotage others who are ahead of them with the press of a button. Lastly, we had a new track for the in-game music created alongside some other sound effects. Take a listen here if you’d like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlHcuwTa9Rc