CAGD 370 Blog Post 3

11/10/2024
Sprint 3 Kickoff

Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. In today's blog post I will be going over my most recent progress I made in trying to create a digital prototype alongside with my team. For this sprint we all generally focused our attention on getting the project as close as possible to a build. With that being said, I focused entirely on delivering everything needed for my team and I to be able to draw up a build and create an executable for players to playtest our game in class.

Work Completed

At the beginning of this sprint 3, I was assigned 5 cards. Most of them had to deal with features from the backlog that were categorized as wishes at the beginning of our planning stage for the project. Looking at this, I made the decision to focus on things needed to be able to deliver a build that would present the player with the main game mechanic functionality as well as key engagement factors that would cause them to want to replay our game over and over again. The game would also need to be to a certain extent where the player could pick up the game on their own and be able to play it and understand with little to no context from us the game developers. With all that in mind, I decided to focus my first attention to giving the player a basic attack movement. Since the majority of our player controller was done I was aiming to create something that could allow the player to defend itself in the event that they run into an enemy in our game. Since one of my other teammates had already created a dummy enemy, this was easy enough to complete and test. I created an attack function in our player controller script and made it so that the player can shoot a laser/ball in the event that they push the “E” key on the keyboard. After that it was simply making sure that the laser/ball prefab would properly collide with our enemy prefab in order to destroy it. 

The second thing I focused on was creating a deathfloor that would cause our player to die if for whatever reason it fell onto. The main purpose of our death floor was to create a challenge for our player while playing our game. This would require a certain level of skill for our player to be able to navigate carefully through our game. Naturally we also tied it in with our whole platformer genre of our game.

 

Lastly, I shifted focus on creating a screen not only for our main menu but one as well for our game over screen. This was definitely a thing we were going to want to accomplish and have for our build this sprint. Without it, it would have been nearly impossible to deliver a proper first prototype iteration for our players to playtest. Needless to say, I jumped right on this task as soon as I could so that our build could have a Main menu as well as a game over screen As soon as I was done with all of the above, we were able to effectively create a first level iteration of our prototype to then be able to have it play tested by a bunch of people in our class. 

Overall

For our playtest we were able to receive a lot of good key feedback that has now turned into some more work for us to figure out. Overall, though, a lot of people seem to enjoy our game up to this point and it seems like we are definitely heading in the right direction.