Bit Battles: September in Review

[Bit Battles? Huh? Learn more at: www.fanaticalgames.com]

With September now gone, it's time to review the progress made on Bit Battles.

I talked in my previous .plan about finishing up Power Failure, one of the maps in Bit Battles. As September began, my focus was on starting the next map, aptly named Fragmentation. First up: fleshing out the backstory. This involved expanding the two or three sentence description offered in the design doc into something more concrete. As always, the goal of creating a backstory is to, in a paragraph or so, answer two questions: where the map is/what sector of the network it represents and why the two teams are attacking it. Answering those two questions is usually a fairly simple matter and the resulting paragraph makes a nice intro for the load screen. I talk more about getting the backstory fleshed out here.

With the map description now complete, it was time to start working on the required art content. All of the level geometry needed to fill the map needed to be modeled and textured before things could really begin to take shape. To fit with the map theme of fragmented files/broken pieces of data, several models such as towering cracked obelisks, fractured cubes, etc. were made. I talk more about this here and here.

As the month progressed, art content was slowly finished and a series of revisions took place on Fragmentation. The map went from a simple concept in the design doc to a simple level with terrain (rough draft version) to a more complete map with terrain (first revision) and, finally, a completed level terrain and detail geometry (second revision). I go into much more detail about each step of the revision process here and here and here.

So that's the rundown of the past month's progress. Where September leaves off, October starts so until next time!