CAGD 470 - Sprint Blog 5
I am the designer in Group 1, and the game we are making is called Vampiric Checkmate. Our production rate has slowed down slightly due primarily to the fact that a large chunk of this sprint was spent trying to adjust the experience of the game based on what we learned during playtests. However, other than the downtick in cards completed this sprint, we were able to have a fairly successful sprint and solidify a lot of features in the game as well as put up an Alpha build.
One of the issues that we encountered as a group was that the balance of work has grown more and more over the course of several sprints, but there is not a lot that I am able to change about it. What I mean is that at the beginning of the production of this game, every one of us in the group had plenty of work to do with a multitude of things such as sprites, models, programming, and whatnot. However, as the sprints have progressed, my group completed everything at a much faster pace than the programming has been completed. This is in no way a dig at the production skills of my programmers, as it is common knowledge that programming tasks are generally more time consuming and difficult than the other tasks which we were able to complete. However, it had the unfortunate effect of leaving me to try and figure out what work my producer and modeler are able to do while I am also trying to handle tying everything together into a build. Adding more things which my producer and modeler are able to do has the direct side effect of placing more work on the programming pipeline, which means that I am hard-pressed to try and find a balance between work which my group can do that does not further burden the programmers.
As mentioned in previous blogs, the root of this imbalance has a lot to do with the scope, as well as the artistic vision. The scope made the programming very difficult and they have had a multitude of tasks to handle throughout the development of this game, with very few times in which they did not have work to complete. The artistic vision of keeping the models and game low-poly made the modeling simpler, to a degree, which meant that my modeler Carl was able to produce the models very quickly. It also meant that I contributed a lot of time towards developing references for all of the models which Carl was making, keeping me from shifting my focus on other things such as the UI which I am now focused on.
The work that I was able to complete in this sprint had to do with updating the in-game UI so that it is more in-line with the final vision of how the game is meant to look when completed. I added an accessible pause menu that is similar to the main menu, meaning that the player has the ability to access the audio, video, and keybinds menus while in game. Additionally, I updated the HUD so that the items and skills that the player owns are updated into the UI as the game progresses. I also added a panel that shows the keys to confirm and cancel movement as that was something that the players previously found somewhat confusing to deal with and learn. Lastly, I updated the skill selection screen so that it would be able to accept scriptable objects which would allow for the randomization of skills. All of these were important to implement in this sprint as I needed to begin the process of ending development on the game, so similar to my work, much of the other work that is assigned to my other groupmates has to do with tying the product together and cleaning up the different persisting issues with the game.
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