This week we completed our second engineering sprint for Firewall, and the team is really excited about how the game is coming along. It is very rewarding to begin to see something that resembles our final game on the screen. That excitement combined with the lessons learned from our first sprint has boosted the overall productivity of the team, and we hope to maintain this high level of productivity throughout the rest of Firewall’s development.
Our goals for this week were to allow the player to build towers, give the units and towers unique weapons, finish up the enemy life cycle, and clean up the player’s interaction with all of the elements of the game. After working through the long weekend and the rest of this week, our engineering team accomplished these goals and we feel we’re at a great place as we move into the next sprint. Currently, the player can control the Hero unit in the physical world, fight enemy mechs and create friendly mechs to aid in the battle. Each mech type now utilizes its unique weapon to fight other mechs. When an enemy mech is destroyed the AI controlling it appears in cyberspace and attempts to escape. The player can project into cyberspace and create towers on the cyber nodes to stop the AIs from being able to return to the physical world. If an AI is successful in navigating through cyberspace, it returns to the physical world in a new mech body and the player must continue to use the Hero and friendly mechs to stop the AI attack.
The gameplay cycle just described is now fully implemented in the game, and integrated with the player controls and display. While our engineers were getting this playtestable demo version ready, our art team was finishing up assets to make that demo look great. We now have detailed assets for most of the objects in the game, and we’re getting ready to produce final versions of those assets. Next sprint we’ll begin animating the sprites, and by the end of the quarter Firewall’s visuals should be ready for a production release.
Since this week concludes a sprint, we’ll be defining the goals for the next sprint over the next few days. Next week we’ll hit the ground running, and start finishing up the version of Firewall that we have defined as our goal for this quarter. (To get an idea of what that product looks like, check out the Gameplay page on this site.) Part of the reason we’ve pushed so hard these past couple sprints is to be in a good position come the second week of March. Why? So that the Lumberjack Commandos can spend that week in San Francisco, connecting with other game developers and companies at the Game Developer’s Conference. We’re excited to see what the best minds in game design are thinking about.
If you’d like to hear more about our individual contributions to the development of Firewall, as well as track our experiences at GDC, check out the Lumberjack Commandos DevBlog. If you’re interested in playtesting Firewall, make sure you’re keeping an eye on our Twitter and Facebook pages. Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next week!
