CAGD 377: Sprint 3

 

ePortfolio

Blog Post 3: Enemy Spotted

Publication - 3/8/26

The Goal

            By the end of this semester in May, my team, MLG, will have developed a mobile game titled LightFall's Reign. The main requirement for this game is that it contains rougelite elements. Meaning that meta-progression is a must-have between rounds, like upgrades. The development cycle for this game will test my group's ability to follow the iterative design process using agile scrum.

Vision Statement

            Forge your ship through increasingly perilous battles, risk it for greater power, and take down LightFall.

Game Summary

            LightFall's Reign is a single-player sci-fi extraction shooter where players customize a ship, fight through enemy forces, and decide when to extract or risk everything for stronger rewards.

The Role

            I am LightFall's Reign's Lead Designer. My role is to ensure all game aspects are written in full documentation with depth and clarity behind each idea. The goal of the extensive documentation is to ensure all members of the team share the same game concept. Within this last sprint, no major issues have occurred regarding the game's documentation. This has reassured me that my efforts in creating digestible information have worked well, yet I will continue to search for any sections that might confuse my teammates. In the latter half of the sprint, I needed to make a decision based on abilities, whether both ships and weapons would receive them, or just ships. This was an issue I had debated for the last couple of sprints, but now I had to make a final decision. I decided on making ships have abilities only, as it would prevent redundant abilities and reduce the scope, allowing us to fine-tune the game later on. 

The Sprint

            Sprint 3 started once again with a debrief of the progress we had made during the previous sprint. We had many fewer issues compared to the first sprint, regarding card delegation. Much of the backlog had been fully developed, now giving us a better indication of the path we were trekking. During this sprint, the class had a designated playtest day, so we aimed to ensure the game's cycle was completed before then. Ensuring the gameplay cycle was complete was the main goal of my programmer; for me, it was to ensure visuals were being prepared for the Unreal Engine. This sprint, I started work on preparing textures for Unreal and Arnold. After I completed that, I worked on the creation of enemy ships.

Texture Preparation

4k Textures

Low Res

            Last sprint, I created several textures for the weapons and base player ship; they looked great in Adobe Substance Painter in 4K, but when I dropped the resolution down, they looked horrible.

Color ID

            Fixing this issue was crucial, as the game texture size decided on for maximum compatibility was 1k. To help fix the poor lower-resolution textures, I redid all color IDs on the models, ensuring large material applications of the same material, reducing those small applications. 

Finished Product

            Additionally, in Painter, I baked at a higher resolution and enabled some additional settings that would increase the sharpness. It took a while, but I was able to achieve great-looking 1k textures. 

Separate Files

            For the in-game weapon icons, we were going to use renders of the models. This meant I needed to create a separate texture set at a higher resolution, not hard, just tedious. I sent over the render textures to my producers, and they managed to create some stunning renders of the weapons, which we can use.

Enemy Ships

            LightFall's Reign is comprised of shooting enemy ships that are flying and shooting at you. This means the looks of these ships are crucial and must convey to the player the threat that they pose. I tried to keep this mindset as I began my work on researching and modeling the enemy ships. For ship references, I explored several game titles like Everspace, Faster Than Light, and Destiny. Each game contained unique ship designs, giving me a plethora of inspiration.

Base Enemy Ship

            The base enemy ship drew inspiration from an automated ship from FTL. I wanted the design to be pretty basic for a spaceship, as this was the standard enemy. Higher-tier enemies, I think, deserved more eye-catching looks in terms of design and texturing.

Low Poly

            This is the low-polygon model of the base enemy ship; this will be the actual model in the game. The tri-count is minimal, reducing the possibility of a performance hit. As there will be many of these flying toward the ship at once.

High Poly

            This is the high-polygon model of the base enemy. The data from this model will be baked onto the low-polygon model, preserving detail while reducing the performance requirements. I leaned heavily into vents as the main details of this ship, with small sections for an accent color.

Textured

            This is the final iteration of the base enemy ship. The model itself is the low-polygon, with the information from the high-poly baked onto it. The texturing is meant to reflect its danger class to the player; it's still an enemy, but not as dangerous as the other classes. The long vertical lines are emissive to present a futuristic design to them, and the blue accent lines add a nice touch to them. Overall, I think the design for this ship turned out better than I had anticipated. In the future, we might dive into more variants of the base ship.

Shooter Enemy Ship

            For the shooter enemy ship, I also used FTL as inspiration for its design. This ship is an alien vessel in that game; it gave the impression of a fighter ship, so it seemed perfect for an enemy ship that shot back at the player. I leaned more heavily on this ship with distinction and presence when it was on screen.

Low Poly

            

            This is the low-polygon version of the ship, continuing the goal of optimization while still presenting the player with information about what the model is. This will join the base enemy in the waves of enemies hurling themselves at the player.

High Poly

            This is the high-polygon version of the ship. The details I wanted for this ship were for it to have a presence on the field, with sharp edges, and trim pieces that highlighted its hull. I planned on a two-toned paint job for the main attacking ships, being red and black.

Textured

            This is the final iteration of the shooter enemy ship. I had the main paint color be black with red accents to emphasize the threat this ship posed in battle. The red accents especially highlight the muscle of this ship. The designs for the ship, especially the high poly designs, turned out exceptionally well. I'm very happy with this ship model, and like the base model, we could be creating more variants of this enemy, too.

Suicide Enemy Ship

            The suicide enemy ship was certainly the most labor-intensive model I did this sprint. This model class was unique as it moved faster than other ships, and its main goal was to truly slam itself into the player ship's hull, exploding on impact. This definition meant the design should be sleeker than the others to visually look up to the task. The inspiration for this design came from Destiny this time; their ship models were sleeker than FTL's, perfect for the job.

Low Poly

            Low-polygon models tend to leave most to the imagination, but this model provides a lot more detail than other ship models, with it being composed of multiple pieces. The outer section resembles a delta wing shape, and the inner section looks similar to a missile. Both these elements combine to give the silhouette of a ship that looks frightfully fast.

High Poly

            The high-polygon variant illustrated strong details on the inner section in particular, highlighting both the cockpit and the engine section in particular. Minimal detail was added to the outer section. Most often, the high-poly detail is hidden until texturing occurs, as is the case with this ship.

Textured

            The textured result of this ship makes me proud. The ship certainly looks intimidating at a glance; it'll certainly strike fear in the player when they spot it hurling itself towards their ship. The color scheme of black with red accents is once again present, showcasing its threat level. I'm still debating if I should make LightFall's entire fleet black with red accents. I'll definitely experiment with it over the next sprint.

Electronic Playtest

Screenshot of gameplay on Android

            During this sprint, we conducted the first playtest of our game. The goal for this playtest was to create a full cycle for players to experience. Many of our game aspects were not fully baked, but the bones were there. A large part of all the bones being there is attributed to my programmer, who worked extensively to ensure most aspects worked properly with the time we had. During this playtest, we also acquired a new team member, who will serve as a secondary programmer for the team to aid in development.

            The playtest itself went well, and we had a majority of positive reviews regarding the premise and the UI of the game. Negative reviews were attributed to aspects that weren't fully baked, such as the weapon rarity system and the automated combat. We also had a few bugs that were attributed to weapons killing the enemies too fast.

            After the playtest had occurred, we had a team meeting to analyse the data we gathered from playtesters. This allowed all issues to be raised and plans for their resolution to be made with a timeline. Since then, we have actively decreased these issues and have mostly resolved all of them to a degree. Nothing in the game is textured due to the issues I had with the resolution, but by the next one, the game should be largely textured.

The Wrap

            Sprint 3 overall retains the velocity of the previous sprints that our team has done. The addition of another team member should only improve this velocity, so I am keen to see how they perform in the next sprint. During this sprint, I managed to accomplish many things, from troubleshooting to creation. I researched and, through trial and error, solved the resolution sizing issues and used the same method to create three ship variants. The only cards I wasn't able to accomplish were the boss enemy ship, which will be for the next sprint to do.

The Path Ahead

            For the next sprint, I'll be finishing the boss enemy ship and starting work on the other player ships, as we confirmed that ships are the next category to accomplish in the upcoming sprints. Since spring break is also within sprint 4, I might take some extra time to refine some of these creations further.