CAGD 470 Sprint Blog 2

 09/28/2025

Sprint 2 Kickoff

Welcome back to my blog guys today I will be covering how my team and I’s progress went for our Sprint 2 for our Sundance game project. I will also be going over the work I was able to accomplish and some of the issues we encountered. Let's dive into our games working Progress.  

As for this sprint, I was assigned some more programming cards to accomplish, and they all had to do with expanding upon the work I had completed last sprint. Which was essentially our player prototypes basic movement mechanics. Having all that setup I started working on 2 key things. Our players dash mechanic as well as the double jump mechanic. Since I knew one was going to be harder to do than the other, I started with the one that would take me longer, which was the dash. My card for this entailed me to set up a dash mechanic for players to use whenever they would double click either A or D at a certain moment. So, I started to experiment a bit with my already made player script. First thing I needed to do was to alter my movement function to now also check if I have clicked either the A or D key within a single time frame in order to activate the dash mechanic. I did this by writing a couple new variables and making a Boolean as well to check when I am dashing. 

After creating these it took me a while to figure out how to implement them correctly but after a couple tries, I was able to do so. I basically had to tell unity to remember the last time I had pressed one of the keys and if I hit that key within a certain timer, I would suffice the criteria I needed to dash. 

Working on the Jump was a lot simpler and easier to do. For this mechanic I did not have to check If I had double pressed the space bar within a certain time. Instead, I would only need to check if I have jumped once then I can only jump once more. I was able to accomplish this by using my existing Boolean that checks if I am grounded and a couple new int variables that would count how many jumps I have used and setting my max jumps to 2. This would allow my player to jump if I am grounded and once, I have jumped I could only jump one more time. Additionally, both of these mechanics needed to work without messing up any of my old movement code. On top of that as well I would need to further implement a counter that only allows me to use those abilities if I have picked up a sun charge. In game my player could simply collide to one of the sun nodes and the count would go up. Following that I would then have to simply implement that count check into my if statements.

Overall, as a whole team this sprint we had a little bit of a rocky start. We ended up having to change our team's meeting time to a whole new time and date in order for everyone's schedule to align better and ultimately it did not work fully to our advantage, costing us quite a bit of confusion and time spent on the project. We were able to discuss this issue as a team and going forward we are all going to start dedicating more time and meeting at our appropriate times in order to prioritize what needs to be done on time. 

CAGD 470 Sprint Blog 1

09/14/2025
Sprint 1 Kickoff

 Hello everyone, my name is Angel Suazo and welcome back to my blog. Today I want to go over a new video game that me and my new team are working on. I have the awesome pleasure of working as a Programmer for this new project alongside my new group called The Skydancer's. My team consists of Katherine our Lead Designer, Jacob our producer, Gabriel our level designer, Yasmine our 3D modeler and Patrick our second programmer. With all that being said, I would like to describe how our Sprint 1 went so far and talk about the work I was able to complete as well. 

As for our team's game, our Designer Katherine has provided us with her game idea called “Sundance”. She came prepared with a vision statement and game treatment that allowed us the rest of the team to start working almost immediately. Shortly after we were all able to Kick off with the backlog that the whole team helped create. 

To basically sum it up our game “Sundance” revolves around the player having to platform through levels to then reach our games other main game component which is the rhythm mini games. With that being said, during kickoff we decided that since we have to programmers, one would handle the players movement, and one would focus on the rhythm mini game challenges. As for me, my work consisted of dealing with the players movement mechanic as well as other contributing factors for which our games unique mechanics call for. 

So that was my main focus for this sprint, to get a player prototype ready to use and playtest with it as needed. I started by making a simple player prototype in unity to use and attach a script to. When I made this prototype, I made it a prefab so that it could be updated with our game's actual character model as soon as it's done. As soon as I got that done, I made a script to handle all of the players movement mechanics. I wrote a function for moving the character left and right with the press of the A & D keys as well as space for jumping. 

The next thing I focused on was making a script for the camera since I would need it to follow our players position because our game is going to basically be a 3D side scrolling game, so naturally this was super important. I could not just make the camera a child of my player's game object because I needed the camera to stay looking at my player from one angle only since I wanted the player to also switch orientation whenever heading in the opposite direction. So, if my player was heading left, they would face that direction and vice versa for the right. The camera would need to stay in the same position staring at my player as well as follow my player. What I also needed to do was angle my camera's view so that we could technically have an isometric game view while playing. This would also help give the illusion of 3D game space. 

Once all that was done, I could now start working on my next feature which was my players dashing ability as well as its double jump ability. I started by making a prototype of what is going to essentially be our players' sun charge’s resource. This is what is going to allow our character to use its special abilities so I wanted to make it and give it a collider and Tag so that I could use them to trigger Collision events. That is where I decided to leave off for this sprints work.

Overall, I think my team and I are off to a great start, and I can't wait to see how the rest of the semester goes and ultimately how our game progresses until we publish at the end. I’ll see you guys' next time