Sprint 1 Update
- snowbringergame
- Sep 25, 2023
- 2 min read
Goals & Progress
Below we'll discuss our team's progress on the game so far this semester. For this semester we are working with a one-week sprint structure. We'll be covering the first sprint and what we've done, what we plan to do in the future, what went wrong, and what we're fixing from now on.
Goals
Art & Technical Art
Nail down the visual style
Create a solid mood board
Discuss which software we plan on using
Programming
Set up version control
Start on basic game functionality
Design
Flesh out the design doc
Figure out the basic game narrative
Project Management
Set up project management tools for sprint tracking
Create overall sprint goals
Decide on producer(s)
Progress
Art & Technical Art
The team made a lot of progress in discussing the desired visual style and effects for the game. We also looked at the software the art team was most comfortable with to create some consistency between assets. Below you can see the mood board the team created in order to capture the basic feel of the game and its characters.
Sources
Muted Winter Procreate Color Palette - Jess Berry
Muted Winter Procreate Color Palette - Auramarina Studio
Black Watercolor Paper Texture - Susan Chiang
Blue Watercolor Paper Texture - Tanith Hindley
Winter Landscape Painting - Agnieszka Kuryło
Watercolor Ice Cube Painting by Margarita Levchenko
Watercolor Witch Paintings - Andreea Eremia Design
Hades 3D Character Art Process - Supergiant Games
ICE Project Concept Art - Alex De Clerck
Last Seen Hunting - Denna Dom
Dot-Lined White Moth - Jim McCormac
White Ermine Moth - Barry and Carole Bowden
Big Chill - Ben 10: Alien Force
Sub Zero Ice Sword v2 - Ashton Gallagher
Ice Sword - Hovl
Ranni Fan Art - めふぃすと@日曜日西め45a
Hatsune Miku Snow Princess Version
Kingdom of the Black Sun Necromancer Character Art - Wei Yang Lee
Sky Children of the Light Images 1 & 2 - thatgamecompany
Our Friend Macha
Elsa Concept Art - Claire Keane
Charon Art from Hades - Supergiant Games
Lego Ice Queen - Lego
Winter Queen - World of Warcraft
The Snow Queen - P.J. Lynch
Ice Queen - raulovsky
Lissandra the Ice Witch Fan Art - indecentdecendant
Koliada, The Winter Witch - Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition
Lissandra, The Ice Witch League of Legends - Muju
Ice Queen Fan Art Adventure Time - AniFrey
The Snow Queen - Ilya Zhadovetz
The Queen - a-hour
Ice Queen - Bozhko Dimitrov
Snow Queen Character Concept - Lyubov Osyka
Moth Queen - drawnbydana
Ice Golem - Clash of Clans
Grassy Earth Construct - Eeden Artwork
Earth-Ice Golem - Dimitar Bochukov
Stone Golem - Otherworld Miniature
Stone Golem - Tomas Navikas
Golem Enemy Concept Art - Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
SNOW - DangMyLinh
Snowswept - Len Yan
Mouse via Artstation
Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska - Skolai Images
Arendelle Frozen - Frozen
Snow-Covered Coniferous Forest - imageBROKER
Caribou - Maria Stenzel
Design
The team met to flesh out the game's design past our initial pitch. Enemies, move sets, combos, and mechanics were all ironed out. We fleshed out our goals for the semester as well as prioritized certain tasks that were key in getting a vertical slice of the game finished before the end of the Hackajam. In addition to our work on the design, the team also discussed and changed the central narrative of the game. Our game now has a general plot to explain our world and how our player character interacts with it.
Story Overview
Moth is a teen. She finds out that her once great warrior mom is harboring a cursed ice sword. It creates an eternal winter wherever it stays too long. She thinks that the Ice Queen can handle this dangerous weapon. She impulsively takes the sword and heads towards the queen's castle. She has no idea if she can trust the queen or not. She has to dredge through hazardous environments and fight off bad guys to bring the sword to the castle.
The player character has a moth motif, and the sword is the brightest thing on screen the majority of the time; she always has to go back to it, not because she wants to, but because she has to for the task she has put upon herself.
The sword is the source of her ice magic and she is nearly powerless on her own. As she moves away from the sword she will gradually lose the power to control ice. This forces her to return to the sword not only to continue carrying it to the Ice Palace but also to regain her lost power.
Greatsword Combo Mockup
Programming
The team made progress with getting the version control setup. Our initial plan was to use Perforce, but due to limitations with that, we opted for GitHub. The project version for Unreal Engine 5 was decided on after checking what was available to us on the machines in our college's labs.
Setbacks
Scheduling a large team with varying schedules to meet up
Choosing a version control software to use (GitHub vs. Perforce)
Choosing project management software that was free for the number of developers we have
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