CAGD 377: Sprint 6

 

ePortfolio

Blog Post 6: There's more?

Publication - 4/26/26

The Goal

            By May, my team, L.F.G., will have developed a mobile game titled LightFall's Reign. During the development of this game, it's pivotal that we include roguelite elements. The implementation of roguelite elements entails meta-progression between rounds, such as upgrades. To ensure we meet all of our instructors’ requirements, my team needs to effectively follow the iterative design process while applying agile scrum principles.

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

            Our team, L.F.G., consists of four members: a lead designer, a producer, a lead programmer, and a programmer. I am the team's lead designer. My role consists of providing my vision for the game clearly and concisely. From there, my producer would create a set of tasks that he would spread across a multitude of sprints for all of us to do. It's imperative that I create coherent and clear information in all documentation I produce; if any aspect of it is not, it can lead to development issues later down the line. All members must be able to read the documentation to have a collective vision in mind that's as similar to mine as possible. This ensures that development will go smoothly with little difficulty. As of late, I have not had any issues with any regard to uncertainty with game design; this does not mean, however, that I won't strive to improve myself, hoping to learn and grow regardless.

The Sprint

            This sprint started pretty smoothly; each person knew what they needed to work on, so progress started immediately. The programming section continued to work on the core game loop to implement the core features, like different ships and the hangar UI. On the art side, I was responsible for designing a series of boss ships to ensure each battle felt unique. If I had time remaining after the creation of the boss ships, I would work on the hangar background and some simple weapon turrets for the drone ship. The first thing I needed to do during this sprint was to upload my assets into Unreal Engine from the last sprint. Once I had done that, I could create the new assets.

            Towards the end of the sprint, we had an important playtest occurring, the beta build. This build would show just how far we have come with the game so far in terms of how complete it was and how polished it was. The main goal of this playtest was to ensure the core gameplay loop was operational with the extra features we had added in the recent sprints.

Unreal Textures

Sets of textures that required multiple uploads to Unreal Engine before displaying correctly.

            Over the past few sprints, I have created new meshes for weapons and ships, along with their corresponding textures. At the start of this sprint, not all of these assets had yet been implemented in Unreal Engine for use in the game. To enable our lead programmer to make use of the new assets. I needed to upload them to our Unreal Engine project. During this sprint, I had to do this process twice, which was due to an error with GitHub having an odd pulling error. To overcome the error, I redid the same exact process, and this time it luckily worked. I wasn't expecting such an issue with uploading to the engine, but I'm glad I was able to overcome it with minimal time troubleshooting.

New Bosses

            Currently, our game consists of a series of stages assigned to a particular rarity of weapon that can be obtained. To ascend to the next rarity, the player must defeat a boss. There is a total of 30 stages broken down into 6 sectors for 6 rarities: common, uncommon, rare, epic, legendary, and mythical. With 30 stages and 6 rarities, there is a boss for every 5 levels. A few sprints ago, I created a boss model already, which will be stage 5's. Now, in this sprint, I must create the bosses for stages 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30.

Stage 10 Boss

            For the second boss the player encounters, I believed in creating something that seemed a bit more realistic, something that players could relate to real-life in a way. I modeled the stage 10 boss after the Space Shuttle used by NASA from 1981 to 2011. This shape conforms to the ideas of space travel now, but with a look that hints at a different distant future.

Low-Poly

            This is the low-polygon version of Boss 10, encompassing the silhouette of the Space Shuttle in all its glory. Careful attention was made to ensure that the height difference between the wing and the fuselage remains visible even from a bird's eye view.

High-Poly

            This is the high-polygon version of Boss 10. This introduces a new design language that makes this craft unique and not just a simple copy of the Space Shuttle. 

Textured

            This is the final version of Boss 10. The color scheme and its application follow the design set by Boss 5, with its emphasis on long vertical red lines that span the entire length of the craft. Black metal serves as the main body color, alongside the red accents, and titanium serves as the craft's trim material.

Stage 15 Boss

            For the third boss the player would encounter, I wanted to start getting more experimental with the design language of the boss ships. My goal with these later bosses was to incorporate unique designs that set them apart while still adhering to the realiscal physical constraints we're accustomed to. As a baseline silhouette, I used the Boeing X-48, an unmanned aerial vehicle.

Low-Poly

            This is the low-polygon version of Boss 15, its silhouette closely following that of the Boeing X-48. With the X-48 being built to test the design of a blended wing craft, careful attention was made to ensure that the unique trait was retained.

High-Poly

            This is the high-polygon version of Boss 15. The designs on the high-poly were carried out to create an artificial separation between the wing and body despite them being on the same level.

Textured

            This is the final version of Boss 15. Once again, the color scheme and application take cues from those that came before it. Long vertical lines of metallic red with black serving as the body color and titanium as the trim. I particularly like the red acute angles I added to the wing section to artificially separate it from the body; it highlights the size discrepancy between the wings and the body.

Stage 20 Boss

            For the fourth boss ship, the player would fight. I wanted to pay tribute to a craft that played an integral part in the American side of the Space Race: the North American X-15, an experimental rocket-powered aircraft.

Low-Poly

            This is the low-polygon version of Boss 20. The silhouette is reminiscent of the X-15; however, the wings have been altered, with them being increased in overall size and angled in the opposite direction. The choice to alter the wing size and angle was an attempt to make the craft seem more unique and fit in with the space theme, as the basic shape of the X-15 doesn't fit my idea of deep space travel. 

High-Poly

            This is the high-polygon version of Boss 20. As the fuselage ends and the engines start, there is a tightening of the craft before it expands once again. The alterations of the high-poly were designed to highlight this slimming section.

Textured

            This is the final version of Boss 20. The color palette and the application are similar to other bosses, with the long vertical lines of bright red, matte black as the body, and shiny titanium as the trim. I would say, regarding the ship itself, this craft is the most unique, with it aligning with a plane so closely rather than experimental designs. I'm very proud of the texturing job with this one, as it has allowed it to perfectly integrate with the others.

Stage 25 Boss

            For the fifth boss ship, I returned to using experimental planes as a form of inspiration. For Boss 25, I turned to the Boeing X-45, another unmanned aerial vehicle, this time created for military purposes. With these next few ships. I believed that looking towards the military for inspiration would help sell the "presence" these crafts would need to exude during the battle to make them feel like a real threat.

Low-Poly

            This is the low-poly version of Boss 25. The comparison between this craft and those before is the straight edges it has, which serve two purposes. For the story, it shows LightFall changing his ship-building techniques to be more functional over form, and that correlates with the gameplay of this boss being more difficult than previous ones.

High-Poly

            This is the high-poly version of Boss 25. Alterations to this version are similar that of Boss 10, where I ensured that the body and wings appear on different levels by a large amount.

Textured

            This is the final version of Boss 25. The texturing once again follows the same language as the others, with long red vertical lines, matte black paint, and titanium trim. The overall design of this ship is similar to Boss 15, but features a more boxy and jagged appearance, making it feel more menacing and signaling to players that the difficulty has ramped up.

Stage 30 Boss

            In the current state of LightFall’s Reign, stage 30 serves as the game’s final boss encounter. Because of this, Boss 30 needs to appear sufficiently intimidating, clearly conveying its superior strength compared to the previous bosses. To accomplish this feat, I turned to the most intimidating craft that I believe exists currently: the Northrop B-2 Spirit, a nuclear-capable subsonic stealth strategic bomber.

Low-Poly

            This is the low-polygon version of Boss 30. The silhouette is distinctly the B-2 at first glance. The jump from Boss 25 to this also highlights LightFall's new ship manufacturing, creating more menacing crafts, more dead set on taking down the player.

High-Poly

            This is the high-polygon version of Boss 30. Alterations made were to create the windshield, the engine mounts, and some distinctive body lines. The goal was to add all these new features while retaining the B-2's design of a delta-wing craft.

Textured

            This is the final version of Boss 30. The texturing is similar to other boss ships, red vertical lines, matte black body, and titanium trim. However, this craft in particular has a reduction of some of those defining characteristics; there are fewer red lines across the surface, and the shiny titanium trim is hard to spot. These alterations help make the craft more stealthy as it travels toward the player in space. This boss ship is my favorite, as it fully realizes my vision for a final encounter; it genuinely feels like a true final boss to face.

Playtest

  
Gameplay            Level-End-Options            Inventory

            During this sprint, we conducted our most important playtest: the beta. Beta playtesting typically indicates that a game is largely complete, aside from remaining bugs or visual errors, criteria that our game met. This playtest was crucial to us as it was the first time our whole game would be playtested, the core loop, the inventory system, and most importantly, the new ships with their special abilities. We needed to ensure that our game was playtested heavily so we could verify that our game was bug-free and aligned with the final critiques that our instructor assigned us.

            As a lead designer, a crucial role of mine is to acquire playtesters. Over the last couple of ones, I have been pretty passive, but on this one, I intended to gather much more than other groups. After we sent out links through email, I spent multiple hours at the Chico State library gathering Kleenex playtesters for our game. Kleenex playtesters are referring to brand-new people who have never had exposure to the game. Overall, we accrued 24 total playtesters, 10 more than our personal record and way more than other groups during the sprint.

            The results of this playtest indicated that most things in our game functioned well. Prevalent issues revolved around weapon balancing, clarity, cut-off UI, and minor bugs. All new features created within the last sprint worked flawlessly and were received well. A new issue we identified through extensive Kleenex playtesting was a lack of clarity in the overall game loop. While players within our major generally understood it, more casual players often struggled to grasp it. The options provided at the end of each level contributed to this lack of clarity, as many players selected "extract" or "continue without a weapon" when it wasn't the correct time to do so. Going forward, we are trying to remedy this issue by talking with our instructors to see if we can communicate this aspect in a clearer fashion.

Reworked Questionaire

Snippet of the new form and the list of questions

            To ensure that all aspects of our game were properly covered in the questionnaire, I had to create a new one from scratch. This involved synthesizing a revised set of questions based on the final critique prompts as well as our previous questionnaire, focusing on key aspects of the game. My goal in creating the new questionnaire was to keep it concise enough that playtesters would not become fatigued or frustrated, while still being comprehensive enough to provide us with meaningful data about the game. I created two versions of questions, one that listed all the questions and the other that took them and combined similar ones, resulting in a smaller sheet. The smaller sheet would then be transferred to the questionnaire form.

The Wrap

            At the end of Sprint 6, I'm mostly satisfied with my progress. I was able to finish most of my cards this sprint, yet my overall output was less than last sprint. For cards that I wasn't able to get to, I will add them to my next sprint's workload. So, for the next sprint, I will be focusing on increasing my output once again so I can have a strong finish for this game.

The Path Ahead

            Heading into Sprint 7, which is the last, I will be working on marketing aspects for the game and finishing models leftover from Sprint 6. I'm confident that my workload will increase this sprint as I'd like to end with a strong list of completed items. Currently, I'm pretty satisfied with the current state of the game; all issues found are currently being sorted by my lead programmer.