CAGD 373 Game Scene Final Project Post

05/13/25

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. Today is the day I finally go over the work I was able to complete for our team's Final Group Game Scene Project. For the last 5 weeks we have been working hard as a team to try and recreate the town of Strawberry from the popular game Red Dead Redemption 2. Now that the project is complete, feel free to watch the above video of our final walkthrough for our game scene. Meanwhile I will reflect on everything I was able to complete and do for this project. 

Work Completed

In the beginning I started by helping our team model some of the buildings we needed for this project. Although I was technically one of the programmers for our team, I did not have a lot to work with in the beginning, so I decided to help model the Hotel Building as well as UV it. 

Once I did this our group was at a good stage with the rest of the group's models, so I was finally able to head into our Unity project and start working on some of the interactivity we had planned on making. I started by working on our players' gun mechanics. That involved everything from making a shooting function to then an aiming function and lastly a reloading function as well. With all those being said I then worked on adding audios for all those actions as well. Afterwards I wanted to display how many bullets the gun had as well through UI as well as make the bullets spawn out of the gun and translate forward from the barrel of the gun. Once this was all set, I made a Mini Map to go with our project's whole theme of Red Dead Redemption and implemented it through UI. 

Lastly, I would say the thing that took me the longest and that perhaps was the hardest thing I worked on was creating the Terrain. This took me a while to make since I had to be able to match the original game landscaping in order to truly depict the town of Strawberry. This took sculpting the terrain, texturing, flooding the scene with foliage and finally leaving enough room for the river to flow through the middle of it. Once this was completed, I was also able to make a particle system to add splashing effects to the river as well as animate the Water Wheel model our team made that sits at the top of the waterfall in game. 

Problems/Issues

As for issues I would say our group suffered the most from having bad time management skills. A couple things ended up getting cut and or removed from the project due to the fact that we ran out of time and we had to just submit instead. There were times where people would wait till the last minute to get their work done and the project definitely reflects that. 

Overall

I would say this project was a good experience working with others on a big project that required producing and agile development. While we did have some major setbacks, I am thankful to my whole team and their efforts and excited we were able to complete our project.

CAGD 377 Blog Post Postmortem

 5/11/2025

Sprint 7 Kickoff

Hello everyone, my name is Angel Suazo and welcome back to my blog. Today will be final blog post for this class where I will be covering my work that I accomplished for this final Sprint as well as how the overall project went for this semester. I am also excited to share that "Blox Fighter" is now fully published and you can go play it yourself here.

Blox Fighter

Blox Fighter Trailer

Work completed

For this final sprint, I basically took care of all the final stuff we had to rework and or tweak. I made the final 2 levels of the game so that our game could be finally complete with all 10 levels we wanted to get in there. Another thing I worked on was creating and implementing a new background to our levels. Since we had to remove the old skybox we had, I took the liberty of heading to photoshop to create a newer space background that we could definitely use as our own asset into all of our levels. With that being said I imported our game and would now have the cool space theme once again that it was desperately needing. Another thing I worked on this final sprint was to implement the original brick sound audio clip I had previously recorded myself for us to use as our player movement. This was a rather easy task to do since we had previously had an audio clip working already. It was as simple as just dragging our new mp3 sound file to the old location of our inspector window. After doing this we had once again our cool sounding feedback for our players movement. 

What went right

During this entire project, there were a couple things I felt really good about early on. One of them includes us depending on each other to get our work that was assigned to us completed. This was very crucial as a development team to have, especially because we did not like having someone waiting and depending on the other person to pass on work. Our ability as a team to work in Agile was stupendous and we never had anyone blocked so I think we did good in that aspect . Another thing that went well was our Github Repository. We never had any merge conflicts arise due to the fact that we each had our own separate times where we all did our work independently. Looking back this was actually accomplished unintentionally, we did not set up a schedule or time slots where one could work inside the project without having to worry if someone else was. We just each did our own work at our own pace. 

What went wrong

As for the stuff that could have gone a lot smoother, there's a couple of them. Number 1 would be making sure we had enough cards in our backlog ahead of time and definitely before our Sprint 1 kickoff. There were countless times when we had to write new cards in the middle of sprints or during actual kickoff. This was something that may have messed with our overall velocity and work production. It was somewhat of a disservice to the team to try and create new cards and rapidly assign them during production when these should all have been made in the very beginning. Also because of this, a lot of those cards would end up being pushed to the next sprint regardless because of the short notice assignment to whoever was assigned to. Another big and perhaps the biggest thing that went wrong in our project was the fact that we used some outside resources and assets and incorporated them into our game. We were not aware that we could not use anything that was not made by us the development team. This basically set us back quite a bit, since we were told or notified of this issue well into the project around sprint 5. At this point, we had a lot of stuff we were gonna have to redo in just 2 remaining sprints. Ultimately, while we did redo some of those assets to be our own, we could not save everything and some of those ended up having to get scrapped from the project.

What I would do next time

As for what I would do differently next time, I would definitely do a better job of providing a clean and finished backlog at the very beginning of the project in order to save time down the line and work as efficiently as we possibly could. The next thing I would do better is to just have a better line of communication with our whole team. At some points there were times where we could have done some stuff a lot more efficiently by just communicating with each other earlier. Overall I as the Lead Designer of this project am very this project has come to life and is now published to the google play store. I want to thank my Producer Gabriel and my Programmer Patrick for all their hard work this semester. Thanks guys

CAGD 373 Blog Post 5

Sprint 5

05/08/25

Final Group Game Scene Project

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be going over the work I was able to complete this time around for Sprint 5 of our team's Final Group Game Scene Project. While this is technically the last sprint of our team's timeline for this project, we still have until Sunday the 11th to get everything in and render it out. With that being said though, let's dive into what I was able to accomplish this time.

In this sprint I focused on completing the terrain that I started to build last sprint. This was important because we are at the stage where we need to start importing all of our assets into our unity project in order to render. So, I went ahead and finished the terrain both building and painting it for our scene. I also took the liberty of adding a ton of foliage such as trees and rocks into our scene that we were able to get for free from the unity asset store.

The second thing I got done was creating a particle effect alpha from scratch inside of photoshop to use for a particle system in our project. I wanted to create a water splashing effect for the river that runs in our scene. With that being said I also went back into Free Waterfalls Nature Sound Effects Download - Pixabay to find some cool waterfall and river flowing sounds. 

CAGD373 Terrain& WaterFall

So, the last thing I did was, I imported these sounds into our project and added an audio listener to play them. Below you can see how it all turned out. Ultimately, we only have a couple days left to work on this project so we will be working hard to finish strong.

CAGD 373 Blog Post 4

Sprint 4

05/01/25

Final Group Game Scene Project

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be going over the work I was able to complete this time around for Sprint 4 of our team's Final Group Game Scene Project. For this sprint I was tasked with some more cool things to work on and ultimately, I was able to complete most of them. Let's dive into how this week's sprint worked out for me.

In this sprint I was able to implement our new gun model to the player and also create the triggered sounds for 3 events of our gun. The 3 events being, our guns shooting, reloading and aiming events. Each of these events would now play a sound clip whenever it gets triggered. As for each of those sound clips, I was able to pull them from Free Revolver Reload Sound Effects Download - Pixabay which is an awesome website for free audio assets. Once I was able to download them, I imported those clips into our unity project and hooked them up to an audio source for them to play from.

The second thing I was able to do was create our Mini map for our game scene. This was a cool feature we wanted to add to our game that would tie in nicely for our groups game scene since this is also a feature that Red Dead Redemption 2 has. 

The last and final thing I started working on this sprint was perhaps our Terrain for our game scene inside of unity. Although I was not able to complete this, I did start tackling it since we are almost ready to start putting our game scene inside of unity all together. This will perhaps be my entire focus for the next sprint so make sure to come back next week where we will be almost done with our project.

CAGD 377 Blog Post 6

4/27/2025

Sprint 6 Kickoff

Hello everyone, my name is Angel Suazo and welcome back to my blog. In today's blog post I will be covering my work that I accomplished this Sprint as well as once again how our Sprint 6 went for our team. I am also excited to share that for this sprint we had our official Beta test for our projects Beta version in class. Let's dive into how this Sprint went for us as well as how our Beta playtest turned out. 

Work

For this sprint I decided to focus on a couple of small but very crucial things. To start off, the last sprint we had to face some minor setbacks that required us to go back to the drawing board and start fresh. With that being said, I decided to take it upon myself as the Lead Designer to go back and design our own Level Icons and our own D-pad button. To do this I went into Photoshop and created those 2 things so that we could have them as our own assets. After doing so, it was crucial for me to go back into our games unity project and incorporate them into our previous setup. Even though these needed to be redone some good things came out of it. 

Our new D-pad buttons would now provide visual feedback. Unlike before where the players would simply press it, now the buttons actually get highlighted to indicate you just pressed this button which I personally think is cool. As for the Level Icon it was beneficial to also get these done since we had previously only put in some placeholder images in for them, so it ended up working out as well with those. 

Another thing I worked on this sprint that had to be redone was our audio. We used to have an audio play whenever our player pressed a button to provide noise feedback as well. Well, we also wanted to create our own asset for this so I once again took it upon myself to record a new brick laying sound and turn that into an mp3 file so that we could use it for our game. I still have some refining to do for this since I used my phone to record the sound, it ended up picking up a lot of the background noise that we do not want in the sound file. This was actually a cool first experience however since I have never worked with audio before.

The last thing I ended up doing for this sprint was reworking a little bit of how our stun mechanic for our star projectile works. We had received some feedback from our last playtest that players were still a bit confused on how the stun actually worked. I decided to add a blinking effect whenever the player enters the stun state so that it emphasizes to the player “I cannot move because I am stunned” and hopefully it clears up some confusion.

Playtest

As for the playtest we had this sprint, it went amazing. We had a total of 14 play testers play test our game and ultimately, we had such a good turnout. We believe our game has come a long way and we are dedicated to creating a high-quality game. With that being said, this sprint’s playtest was aimed at finding any big or minor game breaking bugs inside of our game and because of that we now have valuable feedback that will allow us to fix those bugs. 

Overall

We as a team are very proud of all our efforts so far that have gone into creating this amazing project. We cannot wait for our game to finally get published and we are so eager and excited to be able to do so.