CAGD 470 - Sprint Blog 6

 I am the lead designer of the game Vampiric Checkmate. The production of our game has gone well to this date. We were able to get the alpha build up and get plenty of playtests including Kleenex’s, so that we were able to receive feedback from people who are not game developers. 

As the designer, I have had to balance helping assign work to my teammates while still remaining in or not expanding the scope of the game. The further that we progress in sprints, the more this balance matters, because certain things which I have wanted to add in order to increase the professionalism of the final product would easily increase our workload by days or weeks. Additionally, most of the work would end up on the shoulders of the programmers in order to handle implementation, and they are already in charge of bug fixing and polishing features. As a result, besides my work posted on Jira, much of the sprint for me was spent examining the game design to see if there was additional functionality or work that I could assign to Daniel or Carl without needing to put pressure on Heath and Joseph, my programmers.

One of the issues which I encountered when it came to the development of the UI system was the inconsistency between our branches and subsequently, the inconsistency of the build scene. More specifically, the build scene was not functioning properly when I initially began work on creating a tooltip box which would display when the player held tab. The tooltip box was meant to assist the player by explaining what skills and items they owned. The issue was that when the player reached the “door” to each level, the UI was intended to have the skill selection screen appear. This would allow the player to choose a skill and then progress to the next level. However, I ran into a bug that inhibited the skill selection screen from appearing in the first place. I was able to later on fix it pretty quickly by making sure that some game objects were assigned to the correct references in the inspector, but it slowed down some of my progress on the tooltip box feature nonetheless. I ultimately was unable to complete this card before the end of the sprint because the second half of the card required that I also implement the descriptions of the items, not just the skills. Item selection was something that Heath was working on over the course of the sprint, so I had to step away from this card and allow him to finish that feature before I could properly add the tooltip box.

I also finished my work on the main menu UI. The things which I had to finish were implementing audio and video settings for the player. We kept these settings intentionally very dumbed down within the design so that it did not stretch our capabilities as we progressed through the production of this project. I added the ability to change the resolution of the game, as well as change whether the game was in fullscreen or not. As far as audio was concerned, I added sliders that allowed the player to change the master volume, ambient music volume, and sound effects volume. 

The last thing that I worked on for the UI was the ability to use the keyboard to navigate menu buttons. When I was playtesting the game, I noticed that when it came to starting the game, switching between levels, and acquiring items and skills, I had to switch back and forth between mouse and keyboard. I wanted to eliminate this inconvenience completely, but I was not able to finish this card either.