Hello reader of this blog ! Welcome to our first post about the progress we made after prototyping 1 week. To begin with the title of our game is Heaven Siege. It is a 3D tower defense game but with some extra twists.

We are a group of students at Digital Arts & entertainment. We had the assignment to make a polished game together. We are working on this project with 2 programmers and 3 artists.

Members:

• Karina Muradian : Programmer
• Zietse Boonen : Programmer
• Boris Tauber : Artist
• Amelie Goethals : Artist
• Zena Steenmans : Artist

We started to make our first idea's into prototypes like: 

-Having the player walking around in our level

-Using a radial menu to select what towers to destroy, upgrade or buy 

-And some prototypes that control the waves and the shooting of the towers. 

We started to make our first prototypes in Unity just so we could quicly get some features working and have a vage idea if the features are going to turn out well. And we plan for the next week of prototyping to give Unreal also a shot and see if it has any advantages and/or disadvantages when trying to implement our previously made prototypes.

For the movement prototype we where trying to see if using a controller to move and interact would give it more player immersive experience into the game. Because our idea is that the player needs to actually move around in the level to build and upgrade towers and also to attack possible enemies.

Our game is also grid based. So we also prototyped that in our first week and to see what was a quick way to implement a reliable grid system. we made a first prototype to generate a grid to place the towers on and so on, but this still needs some tweaking.

Here are some examples of the first prototype results:

Radial Menu

Wave Management and Tower-Enemy interaction Prototype

Grid Implementation

Research Questions we answered:

1. Is it possible to make a adjustable grid in unity  ?  (See: GridSystemPrototype)
2. What is the best way to make a simple but still efficient radial menu for the tower browsing ? (See: Radial Menu Prototype)
3. What is the most efficient way to make a customizable wave management implementation in Unity ? (See: WaveManagementPrototype)
4. What is the best controller base movement for our game ? (See: Basic Character Movement )

Art Startup

During the first week of prototyping, our astists focussed heavily on the creation of the Art Bible.
Our goal was to have about 50% of our art direction in place, so we have a strong foundation to build our art pipeline on. We started by collecting various selections of references that would paint a clear picture of the theme we had in mind, which is Heaven vs. Hell.
After this we combined our references and started making general decisions for the style and workflow we want to follow throughout the following weeks of production.

As we continued brainstorming on various topics regarding theme, style, mood, environment and color, we started vizualising some early designs:

As a first test to find the best suitable software for our animation- and rigging process we tested this for several types of low-poly models in Mixamo.

That was it for this blog update ! See you all next time.