CAGD 377 Blog Post 2

2/23/2025

Sprint 2 Kickoff

Hello everyone, my name is Angel Suazo and welcome back to my blog. Today I want to go over me and my team's progress to date for our “Blox Fighter” project. In the last 2 weeks we have undergone and successfully completed our Sprint 2 for this project. I can proudly say that things are starting to look good in regard to our Digital prototype. Let's dive into how this sprint went for us. 

Work

As the Lead designer for our team, one of the main things I did this sprint was to help facilitate the creation and distribution of work for our other 2 teammates alongside with our team producer. Since our last sprint, we needed to create some more user stories that would help us well with our current goals and overall project vision. The previous sprint’s focus was spent entirely on creating a working paper prototype. This time around we were all mainly focused on getting our project inside of the Unity 3D engine to be able to start creating our digital prototype. This being said, there were 3 main things I was able to focus on and accomplish this sprint. First would have to be our players movement. This specific task was a bit difficult to complete. We actually went through two different iterations for this movement method. Since we wanted our block player to replicate a flipping mechanic, it was important for us to create a movement that was heavily reliant on rolling along the pivot axis of the player object. Ultimately when the 2nd one was created, we felt this one was the one that best represented our project vision, so we are sticking with this new method. 

The next thing I worked on for this sprint was getting the player to correctly respawn back to its correct and original spot every time they have fallen off of the platform. This is a super important game mechanic that would definitely have to be done if we want our players to face any real kind of challenge. I started immediately after wrapping up the player movement, since I needed that work first in order to be able to properly playtest the respawning function. With that being said, I was able to add a Rigid body to my players prefab in order to have gravity affect my player so that whenever they would step off the grid boundaries they would fall and die in a sense. However, I kept running into a few issues while trying to do this. The major one, was perhaps the issue of getting the player block to restabilize itself in the upright position. It seemed that the matter in which the player block fell directly down mattered when it came to respawning it back to the correct position. After a while though, I was able to find a solution and get it to work the way I wanted it to.

The last thing I was able to work on and complete this sprint was the incoming object mechanic that we are trying to implement as our +1 idea for our game. This was something we also wanted to take care of right away since we felt this was going to end up being one of the core gameplay mechanics for our game. For right now though, we didn't have a lot of models and prefabs to work off of so I decided to just use a 3D sphere inside of Unity to represent the incoming objects movement and spawning which was relatively easy. 

Overall

We feel that we are definitely heading in the right direction, and we are looking forward to starting our Sprint 3 kickoff.

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. 

CAGD 370 Final Blog Post

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.