Already feeling the crunch…

The crazy thing about having such a short development cycle is that by the time you finish sprint three. It feels like the time is running out. We only have a few more weeks to spend implementing/polishing our game. We are not too far behind, but we are suffering from developing our level assets and game models. I’m hoping these final things will get worked out during sprint 4. I still have high hopes and have loved all the current assets and features in the game. Here is what got implemented in sprint 4.

3D Modeling:

We got in one of our models for the shield guard and the models for the common guards. Both models are ready to be rigged up and animated. Deniz did a great job of matching up all the enemies’ themes, and the style is very consistent. The Shield Guards can easily be differentiated from the other regular enemies based on their heavy armor and the shield they will be carrying.

Deniz also got us our first character model, the beast character, A massive lizard-like monster that shoots poisonous spikes out of its mouth. It came out super menacing and scary looking, which I want the player to feel when they see this creature.

Moving on to our other 3D modeler Mark, we got some environmental assets to start getting our maps built. It took a long time to get some of these models done, and I think some of the issues were because I did not give enough reference of what I wanted. But now that we got all these models completed, we can build the finished versions of the ocean map and the Island map.

2D Art/Animation:

Andrew and Alex have done a great job all semester of capturing my vision, and we got in our final character concepts this sprint. One for our robot character and the other for our prison guard character. Both came out fantastic, and I’m very excited to see these get modeled.

Alex also started making Icons for our in-game character select screen, and they are helping add some polish to our builds. Each one represents the character very well in a tiny icon.

Alex just has one more to go, and I can’t wait to see it finished alongside the already completed icons.

Andrew pulled together an awesome title screen/ new game logo for our game. It looks super awesome and shows off the intensity we went players to feel while playing our game. It almost looks like some sort of super intense anime battle is about to happen/has happened.

Level Design:

Xander killed it during sprint three. He got a lot of important work done. There are now sky boxes in every one of his playable levels, and we got our final Blockout completed for the swamp biome. I cant wait to see this map build with all the roots and massive trees towering over the player.

Here are the blocked-out levels with skyboxes and lighting.

Programming:

Another excellent sprint by our programming team; I do want to give a shoutout to Tristin for Sending it with the AI and getting so much important work done for our game. We even have a chance to add a new enemy thanks to Tristin’s hard and diligent work that he has done. We now have a working shield bot enemy and a new/updated AI that makes it harder for the player to predict how the enemies move.

I’m very excited to see how this changes the gameplay. And how the players will react to a more multi-dimensional combat system. Trevor did a lot of UI setup for our skill tree system. It came out well, and he got a whole save system implemented. Our characters each have a unique skill tree that you can build to make them even more powerful.

Josh got in, adding some critical quality of life things. We did not take into account that the raycast weapons had infinite range.so Josh made sure the raycast weapons had a range, as well as damage, fall off. And we also did not have a way for players to fall off the map, so Josh put together a system that respawns the character after falling a certain distance missing a certain amount of health.

Conclusion:

I am so happy with the direction our game is going. These are going to be an intense couple for months, but I think if we stick it out, we are going to have something pretty awesome put together here. All our systems are panning out well and just need some severe balancing over these last couple of sprints.