CAGD 377 Blog Post 1

2/09/2025
Sprint 1 Kickoff

Hello everyone, my name is Angel Suazo and welcome back to my blog. Today I want to go over a new mobile game that me and my new team are working on. I have the awesome pleasure of working as a Lead Designer for this new project alongside Gabriel Alter as our team Producer and Patrick Mcgee as our team Programmer. As the Lead Designer we have decided to collectively work on an idea that I brainstormed during the first week of my 2025 Spring semester. In this blog post I will cover how this whole process has been a different experience for me and ultimately how me and my teams first sprint for this project went.

For starters as you may recall, I mentioned in the beginning of this post that this time around I have the great privilege of being a Lead Game Designer for this semester's Mobile Game Development class and it is a role that I am honored to take. With that being said, like previous semesters we were tasked in the very beginning to create a pitch for a mobile game using the +1-game design strategy. After researching and understanding the ideology behind this strategy, it became clear what I had to brainstorm on. I decided to try and implement a +1 idea to the hit game “Bloxors”. My +1 to this game would be to add incoming projectiles to the player making it harder for them to reach their end goal. This would essentially be a culmination of “Bloxors” meets “Crossy Road”. Our working title for this project will be called “Blox Fighter” and after pitching this idea to the class I was able to land my awesome teammates who would help me bring this project to life. 

Work

With all that being said, as the Lead Designer I have been tasked with creating a game treatment for my team and I to envision how we want this project to turn out. It has also been my job up to this point to communicate with both my teammates and especially my team producer in order to effectively create and write user stories inside of our backlog in Trello. While this role has been an additional challenge to take on, I believe me and my team can deliver an awesome and creative project that we can all feel very proud about at the end of the semester.

As for Sprint one, the team and I decided to split up beginning tasks among the 3 of us according to roles. As the Lead Designer we felt I should take the responsibility of creating the paper prototype to have ready for a first playtest, while my other teammates worked on getting a Unity project going as well as creating some annotated maps for a tutorial level. So that was my main focus this Sprint and let me tell you that it ended up working a lot better than I anticipated. 

Playtest Results

During our playtest. I could see that players were getting a clear understanding of the movement mechanic as well as our objective and goals. Part of this success was due to the fact that I wrote such a short and simple rule sheet to begin with.

I think players immediately got the gist of things and were able to complete both of my levels without a hassle. The only problem perhaps was for our paper prototype it was kind of difficult to convey our +1 idea to our players, so we did have to run into a couple of questions from players seeking a little more clarity on that portion. However overall, we were able to get a total of 15 play testers who all ranked our game a 3 out of 4 for level of enjoyment. Overall, I would say that we did a good job with our Sprint 1 and are already beginning to do work for Sprint 2.