Hi, my name is Nathan Beste and I am the producer for the game The Adonai Invitational. This game is being made by a team of students from California State University Chico, in the Computer Animation and Game Development department. The tagline is “Earn the praise of the gods, enhance your chariot, master the tracks, and become the greatest racer in Greek history” and the goal is to win a series of races and earn recognition from your patron god. Our team is consisting of 2 programmers, 2 3D artists (one of whom can flex to help with programming if needed), 1 2D artist, 1 animator and lastly 2 level designers.

       Over the next 7 sprints, I will be here talking about the process that our team is going through. Alongside myself there will also be blog posts from the designer of our game, Ben Smith! We will should you the hard work our team has been doing, explain a little about how it fits into the bigger picture and even a little about why it was made the way it was!

       For this first sprint a lot of time went into planning and laying the groundwork for systems to be built in the future. I sat down with Ben and listed the out all of the features for the game that he wanted to include, we then turned those into epic user stories. These are then broken down even further into user stories that can be tackled during our 2 week sprints. Naturally this takes a while for us as we have to attempt to predict all sorts of variables, but it is worth the time spent to be as accurate as possible during the backlogs first iteration. This will allow us to be very realistic with the time we spend working on various sections of the game.

      Here you will actually see a wonderful first version of the burndown chart! During this first sprint our goal was 45 points of work and the team did amazingly well coming in at 38 points being placed into complete! Lets take a look at what that work looks like.

Programming:

     During this sprint our programmers started off by creating a Github repository, so we could share all of information with each other quickly.

They also became instant superstars by creating the first version of AI controlled chariots, all in all a great way to start the project!

Animation:

   While our animator did not have any models to work with at the start of the sprint, we tasked him with creating a basic model to research how he would approach his animations of the horse running. After putting together a rough model he was able to rig it and begin his creation of a first run cycle. We are excited to see how this hard work helps his rigging and animation for the actual horse models!

Level designers:

   With our two level designers, we split them up for this sprint. While in the future we imagine setting them up into a pipeline, this first sprint its important to lay long term groundwork. One of them was tasked with the annotated map and first build of our first actual racing course, which will be themed around Poseidon, god of the seas.  The other was set to the task of creating annotated maps and building out a test track, so that we could not only test new ideas but have a place where we could re-create lots of different driving situations very quickly. They both did really great work!

2D Artist:

   Our 2D artist immediately set out to create concept art for a lot of different things, the highlight of which is this wonderful piece of concept art for various horse designs! While it is clear that these are all excellent drawings, I honestly prefer the one in the bottom right, but that is just me!

3D Artists: 

   Both of our 3D artists have been hard at work creating lots of different models for this game. Some of them are placeholders that will be modified, such as the first iteration horse and chariot as seen here.

Others are more permanent, such as the buildings and ruins that were created by our other modeler!

They have both done wonderfully so far, and it will be amazing to see the final version of this work with textures!

    This game is looking awesome right out of the gate, and I cannot wait to share with you all as more work is accomplished! Please come back in about 2 weeks, where we will have the amazing work from sprint 2 on display!