Major updates. We had to scale down our final game by a huge amount this time. Being new to this, we severely overestimated what was possible within these 2+ months of production time that we have. We were supposed to “feature freeze” by the end of Alpha Sprint, but our team decided that we could all do better than this. We are all willing to crunch and work even harder from now on to ensure that everything is completed in time and to our satisfaction. We aren’t going to settle for less.
Most of the time spent during this Sprint was on redesigning certain aspects of the game to make it more fun, even with the scaled-down scope. While this re-scoping was going on, Artists continued with fleshing out UI Concepts and Boss Animations to fit the new thematic changes, and Programmers worked on the variety of Player Skills and Boss AI that the Designers came up with. All in all it was quite a crazy sprint for us.
Boss Attack Animation
Player Casting Animation
Anyway, we have revamped the Planning Phase for our game quite a lot after much feedback from everyone during the FPP playtest session. The designers went back to the drawing board over the weekend and came to the team with almost a complete overhaul of how players used to interact with “Guilds” in the Planning Phase. They even came up with Powerpoint Slides (concepts and screen flow) to better show the team how things will work with the new mechanics and get everyone on the same page again.
Screen Flow Powerpoint Slides
Player skills and Enemy AI feels a lot more fun and interactive now, and I think we’ve come really far from where we were during FPP. Our Alpha build itself still feels very barebones, mostly due to some major pipelining issues this time around, but we are confident that Beta will be much better.
Onwards!
Signing off,
Brandon
_NaNicStudios Game Designer / Producer
_NaNicStudios 