Month: March 2020

Week 10 was our first full week of development with our newly sanctioned remote development. This week consisted of deciding on what aspects of our pre-production package need to get done with the remaining weeks we have before the semester ends.

With three weeks remaining until softs, we sat down to discuss what components we think are most important to showcase within our digital prototype. We decided that showcasing the skills of the Plague that the main character uses will be most important. As the game is focused around the main character using and spreading the Plague, we feel that having our white box prototype showcase these mechanics is our top priority. That being said, our current sprint is focusing on implementing a magic system in the game for characters to be able to use abilities (including Plague skills with the main character). We also have begun to play around with unit placement and level design within our digital prototype, now that archers and barricades are created in the project for us to play around with. 

Looking ahead to the next semester, we have created Design Documents and test cases for the Swiss Guards and Gargoyles (allied units) that we plan to be implemented in the next semester. These documents explain their inspiration, story background, and battle mechanics in detail for those reading to fully understand what each unit is created for. 

Looking at the art side, we have begun to create the outline for the Art Documentation to be handed off to the team next semester. We want to make sure all finalized concept art is clear and easily parsable for next semester’s art team to reference. We also have some more finalized sketches of the Pope and main character, along with rough sketches of the Swiss Guard Unit (see below).

We also are trying out materials for the 3D model to create the style we want to showcase in the game. We want to do some preliminary work with materials and lighting to place next semester’s artists at a better spot for finishing the experience. We also are going to photoshop the character designs within the level to test how they look within the environment. That, along with creating and testing several designs for the decorations for the interior of the Cathedral (see below).

Week 9 for the team was almost fully dedicated to transitioning to remote development. Due to our school’s shutdown during our Spring Break, we spent this week setting equipment up and discussing how to proceed forward. Thankfully, the nature of our project lends itself quite well to remote development. Our semester goals have not changed, as we are still going to create a full pre-production package for the team to use next semester.

Looking at Design, we began to research Swiss Guards as they will be the inspiration for our generic enemy units. They are the armed forces that protect the Pope in our world, so we believe that their design would be a great base to build off of. We also reorganized all of our design documents on our drive folder to more easily navigate through all files we have.

 

 

 

         Swiss Guard References

Art has begun to work on more detailed sketches of the Plague Doctor Unit, attempting to get an idea of what our final Plague Doctor design will look like. We also are creating more detailed sketches of the Cathedral to accurately show the tone and feel that the area should invoke in the players.

Last but not least, we are placing placeholder UI in our Digital Prototype to more easily be able to playtest our game. We are preparing for the team to playtest the prototype on Monday to figure out what next mechanic or fix we want to focus on for our next sprint. In summary, this week mainly focused on preparing for remote development for the rest of the semester. We are planning to resume normal sprints starting next week.

 

Week 8 for the team was focused on starting to zone in on specifics a bit in all disciplines. From an art perspective, we started honing in on iterating on specifics in terms of aesthetics. For instance, we started really looking at what we wanted the player character to look like. We have decided for simplicity that the player character should be visually completely evil. We want him to be more of a force of nature type villain to easily explain his motivations. With that being said, we started focusing on what details on the main character could make him seem more unmistakingly evil to the players. Since the plague doctor-like mask is the focal point of the character’s design, we started concepting variations of the mask to try to get the evil nature of the character across.

We also have begun further iteration on interior design of the Cathedral. We started honing in on more throne designs, and added the Altar behind the throne to further construct the area where the head of the church (final boss) will be located, seen below:

 

 

In terms of looking at design and programming, most of this week consisted of bug fixing and tweaking the interactivity of the digital prototype to get it running for testing starting in Week 9. We also began brainstorming what generic units on the Devil’s side may consist of. We are playing around with the idea of Gargoyles as they are frequently connected with evil in many stories. Overall, this week was more focused on tweaking than major changes/breakthroughs as Our Halves presentation and feedback was the main focus of the week.

To prepare for our halves presentation, we sat down to discuss and filter down the most important aspects of our development so far. We decided to split our presentation into the three major components of our team; Design, Art, and Programming.  

We detailed the journey of our progress through each of the disciplines, from ideation of major concepts to our current state. We finished off each section with an idea of what our future plans are for each discipline. 

The quick and easy discipline to discuss would be the Art team, as their future plans have little revamp from our current process. They will be continuing to iterate on all major characters and environments in the game, creating concept art for all assets that we anticipate to be created in the final product. For instance, we have begun to brainstorm different styles of clothing for the head of the church character, seen below:

We are currently going through a process of iteration where the team sits down at the end of every other day to go over designs the artists have concepted to give feedback. For the image above, we discussed which cape and headpiece variations we like more for his character.

On the environment side, we created a simple 3D model of the Cathedral hall to begin using in our digital prototype. We also started sketching out symbols that could be used to represent the religious faction, also doing weekly reviews for what symbols we like and dislike.

We also are delving into what the interior of the Cathedral will look like, such as the windows and throne within the Hall.

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Where we have made some drastic changes is in our process of Design and Programming. We are fully converting to Sprint cycles from here on out. We are now at a point that our digital prototype contains the base playable version of our gameplay in 3D, so we can finally begin to playtest with it to naive guests. Basically, we will be playtesting our digital prototype every Monday with our advisors and other playtesters to get feedback on our current build. We will then sit down as an entire team to discuss the feedback we received, and what we should focus on for our next sprint to best match our feedback. We would then split design into working with the digital prototype to make sure our sprint is heading towards the direction we want it to go towards, and working with the physical prototype on ideas for the next mechanic to be implemented. 

Essentially, the designers will both be working in the current sprint to make sure it is completed correctly, while also brainstorming and anticipating what our next sprint may entail. We think this process will help us to focus on the core of our experience, while also narrowing our scope into making only what is essential. Most of our previous “iterations” on our gameplay have only been through inside our team, so we may be biased as to what works and what does not. We want to be sure that our game is understandable and fun to players who have never seen it before, so we need to be testing with a naive audience to ensure that this is true.