Welcome everyone to the blog for Adonai Invitational's sprint 2!

         This Sprint was really exciting as we got people to play an electronic build for the very first time! One of the most important parts of developing a game is ensuring it is fun, by testing our controls and the feel of our chariots this early, we are gathering valuable data about how fun the game will be. The tricky part about using data is that you find players to test your game who are in your target audience, otherwise the data is practically useless. If you find a bunch of players who do not really enjoy racing games, how can you use their feedback on a racing game controller? After you cover that first large hurdle though, you can test whatever you want! Building that solid foundation though is the best plan for a great game in the long run, as some things you may want to test further down the road rely strongly on those basic systems.

         For this particular test, our focus was primarily on the speed and turning radius of the chariots. These two factors will not only inform how things like our tracks are built, but also will help us determine how the AI should be balanced for the players to compete against. While we received some good feedback, we did run into a slight issue of needing more players to get us the data we sought. Regardless of needing more data though we have already begun to incorporate that user feedback into our next build and it will be great to show it to everyone! Next blog I will talk a little bit about the level iteration process, and how we know when something is complete enough to move on!

Alright so here we can see a newer version of the burn down chart! Our team actually surpassed our goal in terms of points that we wanted to complete this sprint, we are all very happy with this naturally! But lets talk about how our different team members contributed to this great feat!

2D Art- Tamil

Tamil was doing amazing work this sprint and really came through on the concept art for both the player and a chariot themed after Hephaestus, the God of the forge. As if this was not enough, he also began work on the next chariot as well, but that will remain a special surprise for the next sprint review!

Animation- Daniel

 Daniel has also been hard at work helping us create living creatures to pull these chariots. Here we can see some animations set on his basic horse model, followed by his initial skeleton on the actual proper horse model Erika made. His work into these horse animations now will serve us well in the future as horses are not a commonly animated creature (at least for the people on our team).

Programming- Adam and Justin
For this sprint out programmers were hard at work as they prepared various systems for our first play test and our future tests as well!
Starting with Justin, he constructed for us a basic menu system so the player can navigate around and click a link leading directly to our feedback form. He also built a UI element that allows players to have an idea of how fast they were going. He also put together some systems for the chariot that will allow us to customize it in the future.



Adam was working mainly on things that will appear next sprint. Most of his work revolved around creating a racing AI, and as of the end of this sprint he has taught them to navigate the world around them and race towards goals  set around the map. He also gave any and all chariots the ability to respawn then they have fallen off of the track.
The guidance systems

The Respawn system

3D artists- Erika and Tristin
Erika was working this sprint on the horse model's textures, this resulted in not just different colors of horse but also different patterns on their bodies.

Tristin was working on the various plants that would be put around the first level and even carved out a basic map for the level designers to use (not the track part though, we could not let him have all the fun).

 

Level Designers- William and Hudson
William was very busy getting the test track ready for our play testers. With his track we collected very valuable data on how carts handled and how players felt about the controls so far.
 

While he was doing that, Hudson was getting the level themed after Poseidon built up so we could use it during our next play test. Here you can see the first iteration of this map along with a first pass at decorating the area! He also did some really amazing work by getting a water object ready that would make the island feel like it was on an actual beach instead of just in some large blue area.


As you can see, everyone is really busy making this amazing game and we cannot wait for you to try it out in its second iteration! If you want to take the test track out for a spin, be sure to check our downloads area and let us know what you think! Thank you and have a great day!