CAGD 377 Blog Post 4

3/29/2025

Sprint 4 Kickoff

Hello everyone, my name is Angel Suazo and welcome back to my blog. For this blog post I have some awesome stuff to go over but first I will be covering my work that I accomplished this Sprint as well as how our Sprint 4 went for our team. I am also excited to share that for this sprint we had our 2nd playtest for our digital prototype. Let's take a look together how this sprint went.

Work

For this sprint it was very important for me, the (Designer) of the team, to get together with my team producer to discuss at our kickoff meeting how we should prioritize this sprint's work. Everything we worked on for this sprint was aimed at creating and adding our unique features to our version 1 build so that we could successfully present a cool new alpha of our build.

With all that being said, the first thing I worked on this sprint was to create a proper scene transition for when players would finish the level. This would provide a clear visual to players indicating to them they have completed the level and are now on the next level. This was a feature we definitely wanted to incorporate since we are planning on definitely having more than just one level 

The second thing I worked on was getting our player to be impacted directly by the incoming projectile. I first however went and created a 3D model of a rocket ship so that I can correctly depict a rocket ship being fired at our player. Once I did that, I started working on the movement and behavior for this Rocket Ship and was able to create a collision event that would trigger when this object would collide with our player. The collision event would basically cause the player to get pushed or sent flying as soon as they would get hit by the rocket. This would allow us to create some challenges in our game and ultimately create some conflict for players to face. 

The last and final thing I worked on was to create a new version of our buttons from last time. Since there was a lot of feedback that we received last time where players mentioned they were a bit confused on how the buttons worked, this was very important to fix. For this I was able to create a D-Pad that would look much cleaner and understandable for our players to playtest. Having this done made the game look a thousand times better. 

Playtest

As for our playtest that we conducted in class, I can proudly say that it went super well. We had a total of 17 play testers, and we received some great feedback from everybody. During our playtest however, we were able to find and identify some bugs in our game that caused some very minor confusion. The most noticeable one was when players would finish Level1 of our game they would sometimes not be immediately transitioned into the 2nd Level right away. There were other minor bugs but that one was perhaps the most annoying one. Nevertheless, our play testers were still able to eventually experience our full game and everything we incorporated this time around. Some people really enjoyed our newest iteration of our buttons and others really liked the cool rocket ship concept.

Overall

We are definitely beginning to cover much of the groundwork for this project, but we are still continuing to work hard as a team to create an awesome working game by the end of the semester.

CAGD 377 Blog Post 3

3/09/2025

Sprint 3 Kickoff

Hello everyone, my name is Angel Suazo and welcome back to my blog. Today I will go over me and my team's newest progress to date for our mobile game project called “Blox Fighter”. In the last 2 weeks we have undergone and successfully completed our Sprint 3 for this project. This time around our project is starting to look much better in regard to our Digital iteration and I am even excited to share that this Sprint we were able to build our first version for our mobile app and were able to run our first playtest. Let's dive into how this sprint went for us. 

Work

This time around I was deeply focused on getting ourselves ready for our version 1 build of our app. That being said, there were a lot of things to get done before we could submit our build. During this sprint I was able to focus on 2 key things for our project. The first things were getting our Main Menu for our game to fully work and correctly transition to our game scene. This was very crucial to have for our initial build as it would have to be fully operational for our playtest to work correctly. Creating the Main menu involved creating a specific scene to house it in, create some overlaying text and a button that would transition us between scenes. After this was created it was very important to enter the scenes into the build settings appropriately so that our programmer can execute the build correctly. 

The second thing I worked on was creating the game scene where our beginner tutorial level would be housed in. Since my other two partners would need a scene to throw their work in, I went ahead and created the scene and labeled it “Tutorial”. As I mentioned earlier as well, I also went ahead and put this scene directly after the main menu scene into the build settings as well. Inside of the scene however, I was able to create a atmospheric skybox to create a better immersive environment for our players. Since our games setting takes place in space, I went ahead and found a free HDRI (Satara Night (No Lamps) HDRI • Poly Haven) from Polyhaven and imported into that scene to create the skybox. Once this was said done it was ready for my other teammates to import their stuff and easily set up. That included our first basic level design as well as our player prototype, we have working. Once that was all put together, we were ready to create our first build. 

Playtest

As soon as we submitted our Version 1 build, we were ready for our playtest, and I can honestly say that it went fantastic. We had a total of 24 play testers, and we gathered a lot of super important and useful feedback that will help us even more for our next build. As for this playtest though, some of the key feedback we received was perhaps how much people liked our player movement mechanics. Another detail was as well our overall creativeness. Most people who gave us feedback said they really enjoyed playing our game but that they wish we had a little more to offer. Since this was our first version, we wanted to start off basic but still deliver the core gameplay mechanics of our game.

Overall

We feel that this Sprint went extremely well, and we cannot wait to get started on our next sprint. Ultimately moving forward, we want to aim to provide as much new game components as we can in order to provide the players with a more versatile game experience that can produce many more exciting experiences.