Hello Everybody, I Have Returned

Back at it again with another design cycle for trapped. I have been excited about this new design cycle for my game. We are taking our ideas above and beyond this time and making some extreme changes to our game. I spent a long hard time figuring out everything that felt incomplete in our game. I struggled because I felt like the game was still not quite fun at the end of the semester. I want to note that this is not my team’s fault; it was honestly just the fault of myself. My incomplete backlog led to a foggy, confused vision that did not pan out well. This semester I plan on addressing all the mistakes I made last semester.

Sprint #1:

I am super excited To say that this sprint started with quite the bang. We got great work done for everybody. I want to shout out a programmer on my team for being the real MVP. Josh Knapp created so many elements of our game in this sprint. He set us up for a hopefully very successful Sprint 2 into our playtest. But to get started, I would like to talk about our art team.

I got started by getting some excellent references together. Gathering references was something I felt I did incorrectly last semester and wanted to try to create a new way to show what I wanted from our concepts. I made a vision board for each of the characters I wanted to complete. At the center of each panel was a picture of the primary reference, surrounded by smaller images of other references I thought fit some element of what I wanted. Here is an example of one of those boards.

The references I got for all the vision boards I have created were stellar. The style was what I wanted, and both the artists did an excellent job of matching up each other’s characters.

We got our 3D modelers working on some environmental assets because we didn’t have the concepts to complete a character. In our second sprint, we will get working on that. We got our fuel cells made and a turret asset to track and attack the player. The turret is perfect; it perfectly matches the enemy characters’ theme and will fit right into our maps.

Our two level designers came up with two new maps, from annotated maps to blockouts. I was impressed by the speed of how they completed this. They both did a great job of utilizing the features and keeping each map’s themes consistent. I wrote a description of each area and what was in them in the design doc. I can’t wait for our players to jump around and experience these new worlds.

Last but not least, we have our programming team. Josh started with getting our new character ability system up and running. I didn’t realize this would only take him one sprint, but at the end of the two weeks, josh had implemented all the character abilities. It was awesome to see, the new player controller worked beautifully, and it felt excellent to move around and aim with. The new controller will fit perfectly with the fast-paced gameplay we want.

I want to say that the work shown here is only a fraction of the work completed by Josh. I would have to make a whole other blog post for just Josh if I wanted to put all his programmed abilities in here.

Trevor created a clock that shows the game’s scaling difficulty as the player advances through the levels. This feature is something that was missing from the original trapped game. The player can now race against the clock and understand how it gets more difficult over time.

Tristen took on the difficult task of AI and did a great job creating a functional soldier that can strafe to avoid the player’s shots randomly. Enemies now also have health bars and have spawners that they can spawn out of. The new enemies will give a new sense of suffocation for the player as they fill the map as they are spawned.

Conclusion:

With all the vast and crazy changes we are making to this game, it was imperative to come out of the gate swinging. I believe we did just that; my team came prepared and ready to put in the work this sprint, and I am incredibly pleased with the outcome. I can’t wait for the playtest and the next sprint; if we keep up at this pace, our game will be so much fun.