It’s Coming Together…

So far, we have done a great job with the whole redesign of our game. Our mechanics are shaping out; I believe they just need to be refined and balanced slightly to make the game fairer and more understandable. After our first playtest, I think the most significant issues that came out of it were(planned solutions listed under)…

1. Inmate 001 was way too OP; the other characters were just garbage.

• Cut inmates’ damage in half, buff up the other character’s abilities to make them more effective.

1. UI was confusing and didn’t display enough info.

• Reimplement the cooldown system for abilities
• Add in the difficulty time clock.
• Add (x/4) UI reading where x is the number of fuel cells picked up so far.

1. Maps were a bit too large, and it was too easy to get lost.

• Add a large particle effect around the teleporter so that the player can keep track of it better.
• Increase overall player speed
• Add more landmarks into the levels. 

1. Way too many enemies spawning causing them to react strangely

• Reduce active spawners
• Make enemies stronger/fewer spawns.
• More erratic AI behavior to make them more difficult.

Now we have our plan moving forward along with the other ideas already in motion.

Sprint #2:

I believe we all got a little too comfortable with how the first sprint went. There was a bit of a slowdown when it came to task completion. We aren’t lagging that much, but we will be super behind by sprint 3s end if it keeps up. But we did get some high-quality work in, and I am impressed with how the game is coming together. All our core mechanics are almost completed and in the game, which is crucial because we can immediately start balancing them.

For starters, I want to talk about the excellent concept work we got for our game in Sprint 2. Very excited to see these new concepts as models with textures. I am very blessed with my 2D artists; they both seem to have an excellent grasp of this game’s vision, and it shows in the art produced.

Here are some Portal concepts that Andrew did that came out fantastic. These portals are what the player will emerge from as they transport themselves from level to level. Honestly, my favorite one is the vehicle with the ramp. It looks so badass, and the idea of a mobile teleporter vehicle is just so cool. I hope we can see them all in our game soon. Andrew also gave us our final enemy concept.

Andrew gave us these hulking shield guards. They look super intimidating, and I do not want to be challenged by them on the battlefield. They match all the other enemies in the game very well. This picture marks the end for our enemy concepts needed for the game.

Two more character concepts came out from Alex this sprint. This character is an update of the main character in our original game. I’m very excited about how it turned out. He looks just like the regular guy he should be. I wanted all these characters to be very different from each other to create an interesting group. And on the other end of character design, we have our craziest character design.

The CROC is my favorite design. Alex did a great job capturing the beast in this character. Built like a lizard gorilla. This spiked toxic creature is a danger to anyone. I’m excited to see this monster modeled and running around.

Sadly we only got one card done for modeling this sprint which did make me pretty disappointed. Modeling is lagging our game behind at this point right now; we only have like four models completed by the end of sprint 2. I need both my modelers to step it up a bit because, at this point, they are letting the team down with the amount of work completed.

For modeling, we got our X laser turret, another hazard completed for our city map.  

For level-design, we got two more annotated maps turned into blockouts for our level rotation. It looks like we only need one more map planned out, and then we will be all set for our levels. Very happy with the speed at which these map plans are coming out because the more testing time we get in with them, the more we can perfect them.

And here are the blockouts that we got for the sprint

The top one is the meteor map that is a meteor mining facility. And the lower one is the frozen peaks map, an abandoned military base set high up in the mountains.

Our programmers have all been doing a great job of producing excellent mechanics. Josh ended up creating the rest of the hazard mechanics we need for the game this sprint. I'm hoping we can get them implemented before the next playtest. Trevor has been getting our core AI components together, which he has done an excellent job with. Tristen’s AI is challenging and does an excellent job of attacking the player and navigating our maps.

Conclusion:

Everything seems to be coming together even though we are behind. Our game feels more fun than it ever has to play, and I think we can only go up from here. I’m still super excited to see the outcome, even though I am slightly worried about producing some of our game elements. I think that with our strong mechanics, it’s going to pan out great no matter what.