Design Dev Log 5:

This has been such a humbling awesome experience. Seeing my idea starting to reach its final form is making me extremely excited. We finished assigning our final features and I’m once again baffled by the awesomeness (not an academic word sorry) of my team. We are moving towards a finished product faster than I have expected.

Sprint 5:

We did not make as much progress in this sprint as we have in others but that was expected. We only have a couple more features in the works so many of our programmers spent time bug fixing instead of pushing through more features. I’m very happy about this because it’s putting on some polish to our game that I wasn’t expecting until sprint 6.

For our 2D assets, we got in our character customization screen layout. This is something I was very much looking forward to in our game. I know how much players love unlockables as well as character customization. Having a clear streamlined path for our players to follow will make them more excited and enticed to continue playing our game. Being able to collect all the customizable player pieces will be a rewarding experience.

We also got some initial sketches for our final poster. Our game follows a very clean cut sci-fi look. Having the poster reflect that will help market our game and make it appear more professionally done. We also want to tease our game idea in the poster to try and catch potential players’ curiosity. If we give away too much info in our poster It might be too much of an oversell.

We also got some awesome logos for our team and game to put on splash screens at the start of our game. Adding in these smaller details will push our game to the forefront when it comes to advertising. We wanted a simple recognizable logo especially since our studio mane is a little long.

Our 3D artist Shawn brought us a final pass on our main menu. Once again I was blown away by the professionalism as well as the skill in this scene. Shawn has done such a good job with this and we have perfected our “landing zone” in the game. This is something I wanted in our game that I thought would help set it apart from the rest. Having this beautiful scene sets the mood even before you hit the play button so you know what you are getting into.

He also has provided us with really cool landmarks to help orient the player on our cubes. A lot of the players tend to get lost within the different faces of the cubes. To help tell the different faces apart we have now added larger landmarks so the player can make note of which landmarks they have passed.

This sprint Ryan has given us our finished weapons. These are going to be customizable in the customization screen. They will have different shader options just like the models to give even more options to the player.

Ryan also finished up a bleed particle effect for one of our modifiers. This will help the player understand the condition they are in so they know why they are taking damage constantly. I am super excited to see it implemented by the programmers because I feel like our game is slightly lacking in our player feedback.

Our level designers took on the task of adding more assets to our levels. This will help the player feel like they are stuck on an industrious cube. Recently we came across another option for our cube aesthetics so I am looking forward to trying that out in the future. But right now I am happy with the piping and vents that cover our cubes. It makes it feel like a strange sci-fi environment which is what we are trying to achieve. We might want to mess around a bit with the cube textures soon because they are a little bright for the mood of our game.

Christain from our programming team gave us an options menu. Our game was lacking this for a while and I’m happy that we are now able to change the settings of our game. I know a lot of gamers like to play in a windowed mode so having that option is a very crucial part of any game. We also are able now to turn off the game music which I know I do a lot when I play games over and over again.

Alexander did some quality of life fixes like making sure our menus were working properly with different aspect ratios. Now our game can operate properly on several monitor sizes. Dylan also did some quality of life fixes. He was able to add a dead zone to our shooting controls. Making them less sensitive to the touch so the player could have more control over the direction they would like to shoot.

Dylan also added new modifiers to our game loop. This will help increase the replayability as well as the difficulty of our game. Having more modifier options for the player means that there are now more approaches the player can take in a run. I’m extremely happy with the bleed modifier because of the difficulty spike it gives throughout the run.

Conclusion:

Once again I have been extremely happy with this sprint. I cannot believe we have only 2 more sprints to go!! It’s crazy how fast this experience has gone by. And once again I cannot stress enough how lucky I am to have the team that I do working on this title. We have been able to add more features than I had originally planned on pushing our project over my expectation level. Now that we have made it this far it’s time to put on that final 20% of polish in the time that we have left. I think everyone who has worked on this game should be proud of the work they have been providing.