12/15/2024
Sprint 5 Review
Hello everyone and welcome back to my last and final blog post for this semester's 370 digital prototype. Our last sprint has officially finished and today I will be wrapping up our final news that I have for you guys as well as updating you on how our final prototype playtest went and how it turned out.
Work Completed
Starting off I will talk about the work I focused on for our 5th and final sprint we had left. With that being said, my team and I devoted this sprint to making sure we had enough time to work out any last-minute technical issues and also add any last and final features we could fit in. While we definitely did our best to add some finishing touches, we made sure to leave enough time to not only do some bug testing but to also make sure our final prototype build would work on any working pc. This was especially important because we wanted to make sure our final iteration of our digital prototype would run nice and smoothly, so that when we would run it on our last in class day for playtesting it would work efficiently. We definitely worked hard to make sure of that.
As for the actual work I did, it honestly came down to a lot of final touches or small little improvements based on our last playtest we had. One major thing that needed to be reworked was perhaps my moving platforms from last time. During our last playtest I figured out from watching our play testers play our prototype that there was actually a small issue with the moving platforms. Essentially, whenever the player character would jump onto a moving platform, they would not move with it and instead the platform would leave the player behind. When watching this, I noticed that players would get disappointed or frustrated that the moving platforms did not work correctly, so I knew I had to fix this as soon as possible. What it basically came down to was that there was no collision event being detected from the player, so I opened my moving platform script and was able to make that collision detection happen. Since I created 3 different moving platforms, naturally when I was able to fix it for one platform, I fixed it for all of them.
Another thing that I worked on improving from last time was perhaps the enemy prefabs to better reflect that they are actually enemies. Last time during our playtest we had a number of play testers who got confused and actually thought that the enemy prefabs were actually health power ups. The confusion started when play testers saw that the enemies had a health UI above them and seemed to appear like normal power up pickups. Knowing this I did a small update on the enemy prefabs to better reflect their appearance so that future play testers could know these mean danger.
The last but not least thing I worked on this sprint was to create a final boss battle stage or level that would need to be transitioned into only after the player has defeated or passed all other levels first. This stage or level would serve as a final boss battle for our player to know that they have entered the final stage of our game and they need to pass this in order to finish our game. Naturally when I was designing this final stage I wanted it to have the ambiance of a forest or lost woods environment, so I was able to find these amazing free assets inside of the Unity Asset Store:credit to JustCreate and their Low-Poly Simple Nature Pack | 3D Landscapes | Unity Asset Store. After downloading and importing these assets into our project folder, it was as simple as making sure they had all their colliders turned on as well as their proper materials assigned inside of unity and then me and my team could use them to create an awesome environment that would tie to our games genre.
After all these final updates were complete it was time to create our digital prototypes last and final build in order to have it ready for our last day in class playtest.
Overall
During our project, several things went well, starting with our ability to work cohesively as a group without encountering any major issues. The division of tasks was handled efficiently, thanks to our backlog and the guidance of our Team Producer. As a result, we were able to take our project from a simple paper prototype to a fully functioning digital version with minimal changes to the original game concept. However, there were also challenges we faced. Time management was a significant hurdle—while we managed to deliver a working prototype, there were moments when we could have spent more time refining certain aspects of the project. Communication was another area where we struggled; there were times when it was difficult to coordinate team meetings to address important issues. Additionally, we didn’t give enough attention to our main game mechanic the player's teleport function which should have been a stronger focus. Looking ahead, we recognize that improving communication and being more disciplined about scheduling meetings will be crucial. These aspects of teamwork should never be overlooked if we want to achieve better results in the future.
11/24/2024
Sprint 4 Kickoff
Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. It's been 2 weeks since I last updated you guys and today, I have a lot of exciting news to share with you. My team and I have just wrapped up our 4th Sprint for our game project of our working title called “Wisp’s Light” and so far, we are doing very well. In this sprint we had our official 2nd playtest of our digital prototype, and we had some huge success so let's dive in.
In the beginning of this sprint, we once again had our kickoff where each of us was assigned a couple of tasks inside of our Trello Backlog and at this point, we knew what we had to accomplish in order to get our prototype ready for a second round of playtesting. With that in mind we also took a second look at our previous feedback we had gotten from our first playtest of our digital prototype in order to refine and tune some of those areas that needed fixing.
Work Completed
One of the main things we wanted to definitely revisit and take care of this time around was our main game mechanic which was the player's teleportation movement. Alongside with that came the issue of reconfiguring our players' 3rd person camera that definitely needed improvement. Those were perhaps 2 of the main things we as a team took care of this time around and that ultimately helped our prototype get back on the right track.
As for my work that I was able to accomplish this sprint, I was able to create a Boss enemy prefab inside of our unity project to be used in our prototype for a possible end level boss fight.
While I was able to design the boss, we did not get to incorporate him into our level quite yet, since we are still working with a beginner level course for our prototype. However, we do have plans for our upcoming and final iteration of our prototype to definitely include him. The second thing I worked on was creating a moving platform that could transport our player from one place to another. Typically, the player would only come across these in some parts of
our game where they would have to get from one side to the other avoiding falling down and ultimately dying. This would allow us to give our game some more of that platformer genre as well. Once I got it to work, I decided to make 2 other variants of the same one, only that those would move in totally different directions. The first one moved forward and back, the second side to side and the last one up and down. However, there was one small issue I encountered when making these and I'll go over that in a second. Lastly, the final thing I worked on for this sprint was refining the players' attack. Our goal is to try to get the player to have a lock on target for the enemies in our game so that when the player is attacking, they have more control where their attack goes.
Overall
As for issues this sprint, I only really had the one with the moving platforms. The issue was that whenever the player jumped on top of the platforms they wouldn’t be taken along for the ride with the platform, instead the platform would continue going leaving the player behind. At first, I thought it was a simple fix by making sure the collision event was being triggered properly between both game objects. However, I soon realized that it was much more complicated than that so unfortunately the issue could not be resolved before our playtest. In the end though players seem to enjoy our second iteration of our digital prototype, and we had much better results this time around.
Sprint 3 Kickoff
Work Completed
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.
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.
My focus this sprint was to be able to create a functional Player controller set up in unity, so that it could allow for some other features of our game to be tested by me and my group mates Hannah and Yasmine, as soon as possible. Another reason I wanted to tackle this right off the bat was due to the fact that for this project we are tasked with creating a unique movement that we can showcase as our main game mechanic. As for our game, we decided that our unique movement would be Teleportation for our player. Keeping this in mind, it allowed me to write a script that would cover our players basic movement using the WASD keys on keyboard to then be able to work on the teleportation.
Kickoff
Once our group was formed, we all decided who would take on what role for our group and what skills everyone would provide to the group. Since we decided to work on Hannah’s pitch idea she stuck with the Lead Designer Role, Yasmine agreed to be our Team Producer and I was able to secure the Programmer role for our team. Afterwards we set our priorities for the project and the prototype in scope and we were able to quickly set up a backlog that would help us document all of our Needs, Wants and Wishes we would have for this project. Generally when we were creating these objectives for our project we definitely kept in mind what our players would want from our video game and decided to create these objectives based on user stories. We also made sure we would create enough of these by breaking them down as specific as we could to the point that it would provide and also cover a good amount of workload for our team's mission. At this point we as a team felt like we had established some good ground work to be able to start our first Sprint Kickoff.
Challenges Faced
During Sprint Kickoff every person in our group got assigned 2 weeks worth of work. Our first goal however, was for our team to effectively create a paper prototype of our digital design. It was at this stage that we began to face some challenges in our project. We began to think about how we could creatively design a paper prototype that would perfectly envision what our digital prototype should look like. We began brainstorming some unique ideas and ultimately we stuck with the design down below. We figured that we could focus a little more on our game's main mechanic which is for the player to be able to teleport between spots on the map. So ultimately we decided to stick with this design along with our rulesheet we created in order to be able to playtest with people and hopefully receive some useful feedback.
During our Playtests, we were able to discover a few areas of our paper prototype that succeeded and a few that perhaps could use some more revisiting or improvement. One thing that playtesters really understood from our rulesheet was the whole movement of our player which was also our main game mechanic, so overall we felt that we explained that section and implemented it really well into our paper prototype. As for some stuff that we noticed went wrong were perhaps the implementation of sub character to our players role. For our game we decided that the player should protect another sub character at all times in order to stay alive in the game.This resulted in some confusion from our playtesters that ultimately created some frustration as well. Another thing we could have done differently was to shorten some areas of our rulesheet that also created some frustration in getting the game started. Overall this is some stuff we need to work on going forward in our digital design for our prototype and it definitely helped receiving this feedback right now during our paper prototype.
No comments:
Post a Comment