Riley Bufton

View The Grand Master project page here

The Grand Master Development Blog

In my second semester of my senior year in the Game Design Program at Champlain College, I am tasked with teaming up with a new team of 12 designers, artists, programmers, and a producer to fully realize the game The Grand Master. Our game combines a merchant system where players sell items to adventurers and a boss fighting system where players take on mythical bosses to save the realm. In this development blog, I will record what I have worked on throughout the week and what my team discussed in meetings.

Week of January 20:

This week, the production group and I met a few times to figure out what we should all work on and where we want the game as a whole to go. We decided on few different things. In our first meeting I pitched the idea of a dialogue system and began working on a design document illustrating how I see the personality and dialogue system working for the interactions with customers.

On Monday, all of the designers met to catch up on what we were all doing and to clarify a few narrative points. In this meeting I showed off the finished personality and dialogue design doc and explained how it would work. Next, we went over some ideas for the lore in our game and decided on how we wanted to reveal some of this information to the player.

On Wednesday, we again met as a full team to figure a few more things out. Each of the groups, programmers, artists, and designers, explained what they talked about in each of their meetings and let the others give input to their ideas. After, we decided to iron out exactly what we thought we could accomplish this semester. We initially wanted to bring the full game into 3D, currently only the boss battles are in 3D, but the artists thought we wouldn’t have enough time to create 3D models of every character the designers were planning to create. In the end we decided that we would change the view of the Grand Master’s shop to reflect the isometric view that the boss battles have. This change would allow the artists to create lower poly characters, which would be a lot quicker, because each character would be smaller to the player based on the POV change.

Week of January 27:

I began this week by making some changes to the dialogue system doc. These additions focused on how customer’s personality would be hinted to the player. Also, I added a section to explain how dialogue would work with vendors, the rest of the doc focused just on dialogue with customers.

After I finished the additions to the dialogue system doc, I began working on a boss type document that would illustrate the types of bosses we would want to add to the game. This doc also illustrates the different variants for each type of boss and what kind of attacks they would have. At the designer meeting on Monday I talked to the other designers to get their input on what variations we would want and what attacks they would have. After creating a few ideas for each boss type we pitched the ideas to our full team in our meeting on Wednesday to get their feedback. While we ultimately decided to change a few things we eventually decided on what would work. For the rest of this week I focused on finishing this doc and make it look more visually appealing.

Week of February 3:

For this week I began to work on the level design of our game. I began to create a blockout of a new boss arena for a new boss, the lava worm. In this level blockout, I worked in Unreal and manipulated the terrain to look like the arena was at the base of a volcano. For the terrain inside of the arena, I used the Unreal Engine’s default geometry, like cones and spheres to illustrate the obstacles within the arena. During a meeting with our full team I talked with our artist, Ben, who is focusing on environmental art and explained what assets would need to be added to level before it is complete.

Toward the end of this week I began working on my second level blockout, the village where the tutorial level boss would take place. For this I again used the terrain tool to create a mountainous landscape. After this, I populated the arena with assets that were created for the village in the shop level and again with Unreal geometry to illustrate assets that would need to be made.

Week of February 10:

For this week, my team realized that we really needed to change the dialogue and personality system so that our programmer would be able to put it into the game quicker. In our full group meeting we talked about the changes we would need to make and nailed down exactly how it would work. Due to the changes we made, I updated the document I had made for this system.

Also this week I continued working on the level blockouts for the boss fighting arenas. I created a blockout for the troll boss that we are planning. For this level I made the arena smaller than the arena for the worm because of the troll’s slower movement. Since the troll is a mountain troll the arena has a mountainous setting.

For the second level blockout that I worked on this week I made the arena for the dark elf boss that would be in this game. Also, since the dark elf has a faster movement than the troll I made this level the biggest. The dark elf arena is set in a swampy area with a river flowing through it.

Week of February 17:

For this week, I worked on testing the level blockouts that I made this week to see if the player could move fluently throughout the terrain. Two of the levels I had to change the terrain and box colliders that contain the boss arena allow the player to have more fluid movement.

After testing the levels I made I let our programmer Dmitri know that they were ready to be implemented into the build. After he got a few of the levels into the build, he told me that he couldn’t see two of the levels that I had made. After looking into this I realized that I had downloaded a plugin that unreal prompted me to download which for some reason caused these levels to not show up for other people after I finished them. Because of this bug I had to redo the changes that I had done for the two levels and had to completely redo the dark elf arena. The levels didn’t take as long to do the second time around so I was able to quickly remedy the situation.

Week of February 24:

This week we had more confusion between our designers and our programmers on how we want the dialogue system to work. During our meeting on Wednesday we talked through our confusion to figure out exactly how we want the system to work. After settling this, I was tasked with updating the dialogue and personality system document to explain our further changes. To do this I added a storyboard section to the document that explains step by step how the interaction between the player and customers would work.

For the rest of the week I continued to work on the boss level blockouts. At the beginning of the week I had a total of 3 more to do: the ice troll level, the ice worm level, and armored troll level. I was able to finish the blockout for the ice troll level and show it off to my team, which they all seemed to like the direction I was taking it. For the other two levels I began to the lay the ground work for them in our unreal project and I talked with our team to figure out what they envisioned for these levels, especially the armored troll because the name of the boss does not suggest a specific setting. I received some ideas from other designers and will finish work on these two levels next week.

Week of March 3:

While meeting with our team this week, we began to nail down a time table of when features will be done for our game considering that we plan to go into feature lock and begin polish near the end of March. During this discussion we decided it would be best to cut the armored troll boss that we had planned. We did this because having it would add many assets to our artist’s workload and mechanics that our programmers would have to create.

Because of this decision to scrap the armored troll, I only had one more boss arena blockout to complete, the ice worm arena. For this level, I wanted to change up the environment for the players a little bit. I decided to set this arena inside of a cave where the ice worm would live. This made the boss fight much darker adding a unique difficulty to this boss fight.

Week of March 10 & 17:

This week included some work I did during spring break and the week that followed. Since I had finished the blockouts for the levels that we had planned, I began to help the other designers with their work. To help out, I began to input the dialogue that our narrative designers had written into text files so that they could be used in our game.

During this week, my team met and discussed our plan for the little time we have left to work on this project. While discussing, we realized we would not have time to implement our final planned boss, the dark elf. Because of this, we needed to come up with a new endpoint to our story because we had originally planned for the dark elf to be the final story arc. After throwing around a few ideas, we decided that the final boss encounter could be in a new arena with both the worm and troll bosses attacking the player at the same time.

With this new idea, we needed to create a new arena that would fit this scenario. To avoid the worm popping out of the ground in the same spot that the troll is we decided that it was necessary for them to be separated somehow. The idea we came up with was to have a boss arena that was set on a peninsula where the worm would only pop out from the water to attack the player. Toward the end of the week, I began working on the blockout for this new level idea.

Week of March 24:

This week I finished up my work on the final boss arena blockout. I did run into a problem where the worms projectiles could not pass through the invisible walls that surround the arena. Since the worm was now outside the boundaries of the arena, the projectiles would hit the wall of the arena. I eventually fixed this issue by changing the arena walls to only collide with pawns in Unreal and not collide with everything.

Also this week, my team began to create rough drafts for our materials required for our senior show. This included the reel for our game that shows off gameplay and our process of developing our game. For this rough draft I helped out a few of our other designers create a script for our reel that would have each discipline, design, art, and programming, describe the process they went through for our game.

Lastly, our team realized this week we needed to begin gathering more sound assets for our game to add more feedback and immersion for players. To help organize what assets we need and what we already have, I created a unified sound asset list that lists all of our sounds and if they have been found and implemented yet.

Week of March 31:

This week I continued helping out inputting dialogue into text files so that it could be implemented into our game. We changed the format for the text files and our narrative designers also changed some of the dialogue to make it more linear instead of branching. This made the text files that we made before obsolete so all of the designers helped input the fixed dialogue into the text files.

Toward the end of this week, I began collecting sound effects to use in our game. I specifically looked for more sound effects to add for the shop and the newly added troll boss. I found these sound effects on royalty free sound websites.