This week, we did some tuning and tweaking of the numbers behind the game to make sure everything in Firewall feels balanced to the player. Alex Schneider led the charge to balance the unit health, base health, and weapon damage to provide a better overall game experience. Another part of providing a great experience is ensuring that the player is alerted to important events in the game. Ryan Andonian and Nick Ferro have been working this week on providing visual and audio alerts for game actions that the player needs to be aware of, like the base being attacked or enemy AIs escaping cyberspace. Ryan has implemented a flashing directional alert that points the player toward these important events. Nick has taken the sound effects recorded by our sound designers and tied those to in-game actions, as well as implemented voice alerts (recorded by members of the engineering team!) to provide audio feedback of the game’s state.

Firewall’s tutorial level got a lot of excellent testing and tweaking this week and is very close to the point where a player can just pick up a controller and learn the skills necessary to play Firewall. Our tutorial currently takes players through moving the Hero, firing the hero weapons, the workings of cyberspace, moving the Hero in cyberspace, hunting down enemy AIs, and placing towers. Sam Wolpert, Mark Escobedo, and Alex Schneider have done some really fantastic work on completing the tutorial, and Dan Rogers has provided some very cool tutorial-specific resources to make that part of Firewall look great.

So where do we go from here? For the next couple weeks, we’ll be finishing up the game for release and preparing for our final presentation. Our final presentation will be at the Sammys. The Sammys is the awards ceremony for the entire Game Design department at UCSC, named after the beloved UCSC mascot, Sammy the Banana Slug. If you’d like to attend the ceremony (and we encourage you to do so!) please follow the link here. We’ll be presenting along with the other Senior game design teams on the projects we’ve been working on. The ceremony represents the culmination of the entire year’s worth of work from the entire Game Design department, and showcases not just the senior design games, but notable projects from the other department courses.

The next couple blog posts are going to be entirely dedicated to showing off Firewall. We’re hoping to have game footage, screenshots, and more details about what will happen after the Lumberjack Commandos graduate. Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Last week we talked about the squad selection screen which the player uses to create the allied squad that will accompany the Hero into battle. Thanks to some great engineering work by Rohan Prabhakar, the squad selection was functional and usable for creating squads last week. However, it lacked the art assets to make the screen look professional and fit with the theme of the game. This week, Rohan worked with large portions of our art team to improve the look of the squad screen, and the mechanical hangar motif they are using for the menus and backgrounds with looks great. The art was backed up by more engineering from Rohan and other team members so that the screen is more responsive and the player can navigate the squad creation options more easily. We are striving towards having a similar artistic style and continuous flow in our game and these changes to the squad selection screen get us closer to that goal.

Continuity is an important quality for any video game and giving a game continuous flow normally means having all the parts of a game lined up and ready to play. This is why most games have loading screens, and until this week Firewall didn’t have one. This week Ryan Andonian engineered a loading screen process for the game and Dan Rogers created some awesome art that is shown to let the player know when the game is loading. It’s amazing to reflect on how much a little feature like a loading screen can add to a game. Having that load screen makes Firewall appear to have continuous flow from launch to play and adds a level of polish to the experience.

Part of creating a completely polished experience is having a tutorial to introduce new players to Firewall. Especially with a game as complex as ours, a tutorial is needed to guide players through all the controls of the game, as well as all the pieces of the core game mechanics. The tutorial effort is an ongoing process that we will continue to refine based on players’ needs, but the development of the in-game tutorial got a big push forward this week. Sam Wolpert took the design and early implementation work done by Will Hare and began working full-throttle on creating the tutorial system. Players will be guided through the information they need to know to play Firewall and new players will hopefully have a much better experience.

While we are designing Firewall with the Xbox controller in mind, we still want to make it playable with a mouse and keyboard. This week, we moved closer to that goal by refining our keyboard and mouse control scheme. Thanks to the work by Alex Schneider, players can now move the Hero unit with the keyboard and use the mouse to aim and shoot. We are going to continue to refine these controls to make them as intuitive as possible for the player, as well as add keyboard and mouse variants to the existing player actions.

That’s a wrap for this week! We accomplished a lot, and we’re excited by where we’re going from here. If you’d like to see the current version of Firewall, sign up to be a playtester! Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week.

To this end we have focused this week on a combination of technical and artistic improvements. Starting on the technical side, we’ve worked on making the tower building more responsive, adding a cursor snap feature to the tower build selection that decreases the need for extreme player precision. When a player is trying to place a tower, the cursor to select which node to build on will move directly from node to node (as opposed to the player having to move the cursor across the world to get to another node). This feature helps the challenge of the game come from strategy and decision-making rather than perfect controller precision and allows the player to flow more easily between actions.

Building on the idea of improving flow, the in-game camera got attention this week and now moves more naturally between the physical world and cyberspace. Additionally, the camera no longer flickers between quick weapon aim changes, but still provides an optimal viewing window for the player to respond to. This change to control and camera match the other changes we’ve been making to Firewall, some of which are at the fundamental design level.

If you’re a regular reader of this site, you’ve hopefully read the post we made about the design changes that are now going into Firewall. These changes started being implemented last week, as the pre-built squad mechanic became the defacto play mode for Firewall. This week, we added the squad selection screen. This feature allows players to customize the allied units and AIs that fight alongside the Hero against the enemy. We’re going to be testing these engineering changes extensively, both internally and externally, and we’re looking forward to seeing how players react.

On the art side of development, our artists, sound designers and composer have been tirelessly working to create a higher level of polish in what the user sees and hears. The allied units that the player chooses now have a distinct look from the enemy units, and it should be much easier for the player to determine who’s on the human side. A big part of game polish comes from effects, and we have a range of effects that are going to start showing up in the game, using the particle system implemented last week. Right now, we have some really cool explosions, rocket trails, and other weapon effects. We’re hoping to add environmental effects before the end of this sprint. While our artists have been creating awesome-looking assets, our composer has been pumping out tracks to provide background to the world of Firewall, and our sound designers are creating a library of effects so that every action in the game has audio feedback. Part of creating a great game is having the experience be complete from every angle, and we’re well on our way to having that.

That wraps it up for this week! As always, contact us if you want to playtest, and see you next week!

The biggest change is that friendly support units can no longer be built during gameplay. Instead, the game will have a loadout screen in which the player can choose up to five units with custom behavior modules that will be deployed with the hero. After the player has finished making these decisions, the game begins with the selected units already built and ready to go. The units that make up this squad are much more powerful than the enemy versions of the same unit type and can come out victorious even when faced with multiple opponents. However, the player must still keep an eye on the health of the squad as it is entirely possible for a unit to get overwhelmed and destroyed by the enemy. Upon death, friendly units are not gone forever, but are instead automatically rebuilt over a period of time; this serves the purpose of punishing the player for letting a member of the squad die (by forcing the player to wait for the unit to come back) without making the game feel hopeless once several of the support units are killed.

This change directly responds to one of the major bits of feedback we received from playtesters: the game is too hectic for the player to be able to effectively address both the action and strategy elements of the game. With this change, the player is able to focus primarily on the action elements involved with controlling the hero once the game actually starts. The strategy elements involved with unit creation still exist to some extent, but have been moved out into the loadout screen so as not to distract the player during gameplay. Strategy elements do still exist during gameplay since towers must still be placed to intercept escaping cyberspace enemies, but waves will be structured such that players will be able to do most of their tower building during lulls between waves.

We believe that these changes bring the focus of Firewall back to its core features: the player’s experience controlling the hero and the dual-plane nature of the game’s setting. Given the flexible way in which we’ve engineered Firewall’s architecture, the changes that have just been described have already been implemented over the past week and a half. We’ve also made some other improvements in an effort to make gameplay feel more tactical and less hectic — a shift that we believe further supports our design changes. Last week, we held playtests with a small number of players who have played previous versions of the game to make sure that the changes are moving Firewall in the right direction. Their positive feedback has given the team confidence that the choices we’ve made will improve our final product. We’re excited about getting more players in front of the game, so keep an eye out for announcements about more playtests!

A large focus for this quarter is testing and tuning, and that work continued this week. In AI, the majority of the time spent this week was on tuning and balancing the unit behaviors. Special focus was given to the mechanisms that evaluate how a unit navigates the playfield and responds to threats; the AIs on the field now behave much more intelligently. A large amount of progress was also made this week in gameplay and UI. The controls for the player’s weapons are much tighter and the addition of targeting reticules makes accurate weapon aiming easier. The HUD now displays more information to the player about unit health and base health and includes a minimap that keeps the player informed on the state of the game world.

Beyond tuning and polishing, the major engineering feature added this week was particle effects. Particles provide most of the special effects in video games, from smoke to explosions to water to rockets. This week, we added a particle system that will allow us to add smoke trails to missiles, glowing cyber lightning to energy weapons, and a whole range of other effects that we now have access to. In addition to these improvements to our visual effects systems, we’ve added two sound designers to the team over the past two weeks. They will be producing high-quality sound effects that will accompany the game’s various visual effects. We’re really looking forward to seeing the positive effect that these improvements will have on the player’s experience.

Most of these engineering changes have required that our engineering team work closely with our art team and our art team has certainly stepped up to the challenge. The most immediate art change noticeable in-game is the resized and recolored units. One of the key pieces of feedback we’ve gotten from playtesting is that the difference between enemy and ally units needs to be more distinguished. To answer this, we’ve resized the units to make allies bigger and enemies smaller; we’ve also recolored the enemy units to make them more visually distinct. Additionally, the artists have also been creating more world environment assets, and creating awesome UI elements for the menus and HUD.

We are still in the process of playtesting and our playtest sessions are going to get more and more open as the quarter progresses. If you are interested in playtesting, check out the contact page, or ping us on twitter and facebook. Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next week!

Our first step was to plan the changes we’re going to make in Firewall over the next couple weeks. Based on the feedback we’ve received from playtesters so far, we decided that two areas of the player experience needed the most work: tuning the various elements of the game to create good flow and improving the visual cues the player has about about what’s going on in the game. The tuning portion will require lots of playtesting, both internally and externally, as well as the tweaking of many mechanics that the player interacts with.

To improve the visual representation of the game state, we’re going to be adding a large number of particle effects, as well as improving the the unit assets and the HUD. The particle effects provide immediate feedback that an event has happened or is happening and the improved units will make it easier for the player to distinguish between enemies and allies. The updates to the HUD will serve two purposes; the player will have better access to game information and the information will be easier to comprehend. The minimap being added to the HUD will help with this tremendously.

Of course, while days of engineering work will go into implementing these changes, most of what’s being planned won’t be possible without our art team backing up the engineers every step of the way. To that end, we are pushing forward a new model of communication between engineers and artists this week that will foster greater collaboration. The turnaround time for art assets should be much faster as a result and we’re excited to see what the art team will come up with.

So what game changes were actually implemented this week? A lot of the work done early in the week involved refactoring and cleaning up code. This is a vital task that needs to be done regularly in any large code base and doing it now will make our development lives easier over this coming quarter. Especially diligent in this task has been Sam Wolpert, our AI engineer, who also spent time this week working on the AI behaviors and improving the way they execute in the game.

On the front end, our graphics team (Vivian Wong, Will Hare, and Kip Turner) has been busy updating assets and game levels to provide a polished user experience and their work has been greatly complemented by the work Rohan Prabhakar, our UI engineer, has done on the HUD. By the end of this week, the player should be able to grasp the moment-to-moment game state much more easily. Meanwhile, our gameplay engineers (Alex Schneider and Mark Escobedo, especially) have been tweaking weapons and balancing units to make sure that the in-game challenges are engaging and fun for the player. Last, but certainly not least, Nick Ferro (our sound engineer) is in the midst of getting some great sound effects into the game and creating an audio feel that is unique to Firewall.

That wraps it up for this week. This weekend we’ll be posting a special blog entry about some exciting design changes being made to the game, so don’t go anywhere! Check back next week for more exciting developments from the Lumberjack Commandos and Firewall!

Calamity by Daniel Rogers

Digital Mirage by Joni Lee

Firewallpaper by Ryan Kwok

Thanks for checking out the gallery pieces this week. Stay tuned next week for more visuals from the world of Firewall.

The player can now choose between multiple AI modules when creating units. These modules contain a set of behaviors, some of which are common to all modules and some of which are unique to a particular module. There are three AI modules to choose from, each with one major unique behavior. The Flanking module contains a behavior that will guide the unit around enemies and attack them from behind. The Strafe module contains a behavior that allows the unit to perform strafing runs on slow-moving or stationary targets. Units controlled by the Defensive module will remain near the hero or the player’s base when not in combat, ready to defend against any attackers. Allowing the player to choose the AI module for each unit that is created introduces a new strategic element to the game that we will continue to expand upon throughout the rest of Firewall’s development.

Camera control can make or break the player’s experience, so we spent a lot of time on camera control this week. The camera now pans to reveal more space in the direction that the hero is aiming, which allows the player to focus on the area of the playfield that is the most important at the time. We’ve also implemented camera zooming using the Xbox 360 controller and put constraints on the camera so that it doesn’t show areas outside of the level. We now have a very solid starting point from which to tune our camera in accordance with the results of our playtests.

Speaking of playtests, this was the first week that we put Firewall in the hands of playtesters! We’ve already gotten a lot of great feedback about areas in which the game can improve, and we’re excited to start on those improvements next quarter. We’ll continue to playtest and iterate based on feedback so that we can pack as much fun into Firewall as possible. Thanks to everyone that came in to play Firewall this week, your input and feedback is much appreciated!

On the art side of development, this week was focused on cramming as many assets into the game as we could before the end of the quarter deadline. Mainly this meant creating some awesome-looking projectiles for our units to fire, adding special effects, and animating the existing unit models. Though much of the art in the game is still a work in progress, we’ve gotten rid of all of our placeholder programmer art, which makes the game feel much more polished than it did at the beginning of the week. When they could spare time from making in-game art, our artists have been finishing up their production pieces. Some of these were already posted in this week’s Gallery Post and we encourage you to go check them out. These pieces are amazingly cool and we’ll be posting more of them soon. We feel very lucky to have such talented artists on our team and can’t wait to see what they come up with next quarter.

We’d like to wrap up with a couple of announcements. The first is that we want you to come playtest Firewall! We are going full-throttle into our playtesting sessions, but we need more playtesters. If you’re interested in being a Firewall playtester, get ahold of us through the Contact page on the site, or through our Twitter and Facebook. Second, we will be presenting Firewall alongside the other UCSC senior game projects on Friday, March 16th at 7pm in the Baskin Engineering Auditorium on the UC Santa Cruz campus. The presentations are open to the public, so stop by if you’d like to check out our game!

As next week is the beginning of our Spring break, there may not be another blog post until the beginning of April. Thank you for following along with the development of Firewall this quarter, and we hope you’ll continue with us on this journey.