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