​

• Completed

  • The player can place down forts which summon fighters to fight monsters (Jonathan)

  • Added a state machine (Jonathan)

  • Improved AI to use a state machine to decide what to do. (Jonathan)

• In progress

  • Making AI work the same for Villages, Monsters, and fighters. (Jonathan)

  • Adding more building types (Jonathan)

  • Improve gameplay to be more engaging (Jonathan) 

  • UI - hints for player (Petra)

  • UI - villager overview menu

• Backlog

  • Art asset generation/acquisition

  • Bug fixes and code refactoring for AI 

  • Improving UI

  • Camera bounds

  • Edit/remove buildings (Petra)

• Analysis of playtesting

  • UI needs big improvements.

  • Players want the game to be more engaging and have bigger goals.

• Obstacles

  • Each feature takes a lot of time and we don't have a lot of that time.

  • Each one of us is so focused on an area that it's hard to improve the parts other team members made.

  • Although we believe that having an actual character that the player controls is a worthwhile feature to add to accomplish our full vision, we decided to cut it out to focus on our more core features due to the deadline coming up. (Ryan)

• Reflection notes

  • I'm actually starting to enjoy working on the game now that we have a lot of things working. I'm sad that our game is almost over because I want to keep working on it. It's rough that I only can work so many hours on the game and I think a lot of things would be going a lot better if we all had more time to work on the game. (Jonathan)

  • I think I'm learning that some things seem simple, but are actually really tricky if I have never attempted them before. There are many things to learn in Unity, and right now, we are each kind of locked into some area of the game (UI, AI, etc), and it's hard to coordinate the actual gameplay - we have ideas, it's just not that easy to put them together 

The team (Jonathan, Ryan, Petra) is currently in the process of combining individual mechanics into one cohesive piece. We have combined the map generation with some basic UI behavior of the NPC villagers (resource finding and collecting) and monsters (chasing after villagers if they get too close). We have added functionality to the UI, and we enabled the player to place buildings on the map.

• Completed

  • player can spawn and place buildings on the map (Petra)

  • player can track the number of resource units his villagers gather (Petra)

  • Collectible resources have a number of resource unit which the characters can't collect all at once (Jonathan)

  • Created MonsterAI that can attack townfolk and make them run away.

  • Monster generation and behavior (Jonathan, Petra)

• In progress

  • non-interactive UI for alerting the player of danger (Ryan)

  • scrying mode (Ryan)

  • tavern and possibly another type of building with distinct characteristics (e.g. tavern enables scared villagers to return to resource collecting)

  • UI to alert the player of some events/status change (e.g. when the user doesn't have enough resources to place a building, when the user can't place a building because of capacity restrictions, etc.)

  • Improving the AI to perform more tasks other than just resource collection.

• Backlog

  • Art asset generation/acquisition

  • Playable main character with abilities to chase away monsters (possibly by collecting special resource such as herbs and making potions to fend of monsters)

  • add more resources for villagers to collect

  • game balancing in terms of ho

• Analysis of playtesting

  • for our alpha test, we could only show the basic world generation and behaviors

  • we need to add the player character for the player to interact with

  • we got good feedback on NPC pathfinding logic

  • more info will be provided on Tuesday after more people see the game

• Obstacles

  • some git management issues (still)

• Reflection notes

  • we have managed to connect the main individual pieces together well

  • although our game isn't overly complex, we may have a hard time finding a good balance between resource gathering, building costs, player abilities, etc.

  • There is still a lot of work to do until we can get the game to feel like it's in a playable state. We need to get some more basic elements done so we can build towards new ideas.

All three of us (Jonathan, Ryan, and Petra) started on creating digital prototypes. Each of us worked on an individual part of the project.

• Completed

  • random map generation (Petra)

  • movement of NPC characters (Jonathan)

  • basic logic for collecting resources by NPC characters (Jonathan)

  • village management UI (Petra)

• In progress

  • non-interactive UI for alerting the player of danger (Ryan)

  • scrying mode (Ryan)

• Backlog

  • Art asset generation/acquisition​

  • Collectible resources have a number of resource unit which the characters can't collect all at once

  • Monster generation and behavior (FSM)

  • Playable main character

• Analysis of playtesting

  • none​

• Obstacles

  • some git management issues

• Reflection notes

  • Working on individual pieces has gone well so far, we still need to decide on details of some game mechanics

All three of us (Jonathan, Petra, and Ryan) worked on building the paper prototype here. We each brought supplies. We started with a brief drawing on a whiteboard. We brainstormed various ideas of created a unique fantasy setting. We decided to implement a "Scry Mode" where the wizard can be able to see what is beyond the scope of the player's screen, but as the player pans the camera further away from the wizard, the player's field of view shrinks, making it less time efficient the further away you look.

• Completed

  • paper prototype (everyone)

  • decisions regarding main game mechanics (everyone)

• In progress

  • random map generation (Petra)​

• Backlog

  • Asset generation/acquisition​

  • NPC generation and behavior (FSM)

  • Monster generation and behavior (FSM)

  • Playable main character

  • Scry mode

• Analysis of playtesting

  • none​

• Obstacles

  • none​

• Reflection notes

  • Getting together in person and working on the paper prototype was really useful​

We decided against the hex-based grid design because we changed our design to focus on one single character, a wizard, who goes around building a village and attracting and directing settlers. We wanted the player to be able to use the WASD keys to navigate, which doesn't translate well on a hex grid.

We brainstormed about game ideas. First, we had the idea of making the game like a Civilization strategy game with some tactics involved in moving units on a hex-based grid.