It was pitch day Brayden, Aaron, and Tony are going through tons of ideas. We devise the plan to split up and whichever pitch gets the most traction we will commit to. Brayden pitched BALLISTIC, a dodgeball party action game and soon after the team was formed. The game has come a long, long, long, did I say long? long way from this little presentation slide, but this is where it all began. We stuck a lot with the original game plan too aside from the fact we chose team hats over shirts, and the game is a pc game.
Mapping out the very bare bones of gameplay plays a critical role in the successful execution of a game. Brayden and Adrian mapped out key components of their visions for UI and for gameplay. We made sure to account for second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day gameplay and how it changes. These were incorporated into the scene flow by depicting active game play, how rounds will flow, how the game play will change with unlocks, and really nail down the vision of what would make the game fun by the second, and fun by the day, maintaining interest.
Lots of critical design comes from the first steps! Here is a montage of some of the early thinking that went into our game regarding design and necesseties for menus and splash experience of the game. We also pitched out the minute to minutes and second to seconds of our game. This is where Will was able to begin developing ideas regarding how he wanted to make his own toon shader, a critically defining aspect of our game. Early stages of the network experience were also documented and implemented in this early stage. Tony spent a lot of time working on reading through the photon fusion documentation to get an early model of host and join into Unity. Brayden, Gabe, and Adrian helped get initial ideas of how UI home experience could be laid out. There were also early map designs prototyped with Sean and Brayden. Gordon also had early stage character controller prototypes under construction in this phase.
This is where prototyping reaches a new level. We implemented a working network where to make up for lag issues, Tony created his own network transform. Early stage menus got implemented. The main gameplay loop was also created. This helped us to determine bugs and where to proceed going forward. We implemented cheat keys and incorporated early map prototypes. Early map models began to be incorporated such as Aaron's playground map and Brayden's alien map with Will's shader! These were all incorporated in with Adrian's UI integrated with the help of Mia and Gordon's player controller. Meanwhile Sean fleshed out a lot of the games sounds and audio at this time!
This is where it starts really coming together! Aaron was able to get a model for the character created and animated and Will accomplished some great work with shaders and lighting in levels. The gameplay was beginning to clean up a lot and ball buffs started to get implemeneted. There were 2 ball buffs at this time: Big Ball, and Dodgeball. There were also upgrades to win screens at this time and player colors. Brayden was working on localization, Gordon and Sean on sound integration, and Adrian on advanced menu design. Tony helped make sure everything with the network was running smooth and that there werent any issues with the ball and ragdoll networking.
As the project continued, Tony went above and beyond to reduce lag til the game was smooth as butter. Through many playtests we determined a shorter gameplay loop with 3 wins to win a play session was an appropriate update. We also realized it was time to incorporate music, so we settled for nothing but the best and got Ben Daly to join the team and get to work on it. We also recruited Nico to redo our animation and rigging since we were previously relying on pre-made animations from Mixamo.
The production class was coming to its final weeks and it was time to submit to Steam. We recieved no SERT violations and were approved first try due to a valiant effort to make sure our game was appropriate and properly advertised. Final touches were being added before the initial release of BALLISTIC, making something incredibly clean and professional. Shout out to Adrian for making some incredibly beautiful art for the Steam page and in game UI the last few weeks!
