Hello yet again from the Production Side of Trapped!

It has been a hefty three sprints and there has been another enormous amount of progress covered within these last 2 weeks. Without further delay, let's just jump right in!

2D Art

For 2D, we did not get a ton of new things, but the things that we did get are...amazing. First and foremost, we were able to get a weapon concept from Sadiq that we can pass onto our 3D modelers and that it an exciting thing! We prefer if the player does not shoot from their feet (as they do right now), therefore a weapon will be needed! From Sadiq, we actually got three sketches, but below is the one that we really loved.

On top of Sadiq's work, we also got some more things from the one and only Atley! First of all, he was able to lay out for us what our character selection screen is going to look like. We wanted the player to be able to customize their experience by purchasing other characters and colors from this screen. On top of that, we also got a sketch of what our itch icon will look like. We know that we already have one, but we figured it could get a little bit more sprucing up for the final product. Atley also did one other thing...but that is the prize possession of this sprint.

I also dipped my toes a little bit into the 2D side of things. We talked about being able to select different characters and low and behold, we have another character! We are really happy with how this turned out and, as Zachary would say, it is kind of Risk of Rain-esc and that is the biggest compliment we can get from anyone who plays our game (at least to Zachary).

Finally...that prized possession we were talking about. Atley designed our LOGO! We are so very happy with it and cannot even begin to express in words how excited we are about it.

Needless to say, things are chugging along slowly, but we are very happy and grateful for everything we get from the 2D Art Team.

3D Art

In case we don't say it enough, our 3D artists are so awesome. They do everything super fast and to the highest quality. First, we will talk about Ryan who cranked out so many particle effects for us and we are so happy about it all! We got a smoke effect, a dust cloud effect (for when the player is in motion), a spark effect to come from the walls, and a muzzle flash effect (from the weapon).

On top of the particle effects, Ryan was also able to texture our shielded guard (that Vanessa had finished modeling). On the right hand side, you can also see Vanessa's textures and model for the common (prison) guard. We are super happy with the model and to see that there will be a visible difference between the characters (even if they are the same model).

The other thing that Vanessa was able to accomplish this sprint was extracting the color scheme from our main character because next sprint, she will be recoloring the main character in two more ways that the player can buy in the Character Selection Screen. We will not post that image right now, but when we get all those three color schemes, you will see it again!

Last, but certainly not least, we are over the moon with the progress that Shawn was able to make this sprint. He made the thing that we are also super excited to show off: our Main Menu screen! It turned out just as we hoped and it is the coolest thing to see in-game! If you download and play the game now, you can see all the hard work that Shawn put in and we cannot express in words just how "on theme" it really is.

Level Design

On the topic of level design, we just want to shout out all of our level designers that went above and beyond to make sure that this build of the game really put the player into the world of Trapped. With environment assets in their levels, power-ups and pick-ups, and new AI, the levels are so exciting to run through. Huge thank you to Trevor who took tons of time making sure that power-ups and pick-ups were in place so that the player could experience those.

On top of that, we were also able to get a new blockout of a level from Trevor (on the left) and we were also able to get a brand new annotated map from Jacob! We are so excited to see where are level designers are going with all their progress and we could not be more proud of them.

Programming

As always, our programmers deserve the highest praise in the world for everything they do and continue to do for this game. Without them, the game would not function and well, there would be no game. This sprint, they were able to kick butt and make an experience for the player even better. From tackling bugs, moving cameras, and making new features, this new build has it all...

Power-Ups (Dylan)

Eliminating the Runner Enemy (and getting a score) (Christian)

Store Page 2.0 (Alexander)

Scene Transitions (Wesley)

Player Currency (Alexander)

Main Menu 3.0 (Alexander)

Score Based on Time (Wesley)

Enemy Leveling Up As Player Does (Christian)

Huge props goes to Dylan and Zachary who were also tackling tons of bugs that came up from the last build and made some adjustments to the camera angle and the character controller that feel 110x better to navigate the game with.

Game Progress

As far as the points and logistics go, we had 168 points total assigned this sprint. Of those points, 57 of them were never moved, 111 of them were moved to To Verify, 105 were completed and 88 still remain In Progress. With that, we are still ahead of schedule, but in a more comfortable way and not a "oh god we don't have enough things going into the game" kind of way. We have sufficiently beefed up the backlog and are chugging along as a team. We could not be more proud of where are at and are excited to ship something really fantastic.

Next Steps

In a flash, that has been yet another sprint for the Trapped team! On behalf of the entire team, thank you again for joining us on this journey and we appreciate all the support that you all provide to us every time you test the game and provide us feedback and read through these logs. For the next sprint, we are super excited to put the "infinite" in "infinite runner", add a new character (maybe), get some more levels in, and fix up some things that might have gone not so good. 

We hope that you will come back here, check out some more progress that we have, and take a moment to playtest the game if you have not already! Please keep in mind that you will need a controller to play the game.

See you again soon! :)

-We Need More Walls Inc.