Hey everyone! We’re getting this up a bit later this week than usual, but it’s been a busy few days for all of us. This Tuesday marked the end of our second Sprint, meaning we spent the past few days trying as hard as we could to finish as much of our work defined for this sprint as possible. This week was also this semester’s Humans vs. Zombies week at RIT. During this week a large chunk of RIT’s campus takes part in a massive game. Only one of our members was participating, but it still meant that our schedule had to change up a bit. Even so, we accomplished quite a bit this week, and this sprint.
As you’ll see in a bit, our artists continue to give us some really amazing work, Sofia is really getting into the concepts we’ve given her, and Xy is nearly done with the Player character, meaning that soon, we should be able to start using some of this work in-game. We also spontaneously received a logo and icon this week, which was really awesome. In terms of the development team, most of the week was taken up working on things for the Playtest we conducted on the 21st. It was mostly just for testing out movement and some of the other core combat actions, but we’re programming the system from the ground up for the most part so it takes some time.
The biggest thing to happen this week though was a big revision to our planned scope for the project. As much as we’ve worked to avoid scope creep, it seems it still “crept” up on us. So one of our faculty committee members brought us back down to Earth, slicing off some extraneous parts of our planned design and offering us a much more streamlined alternative that still included everything necessary to show off what we want to show off, and that still focuses on our core idea of presenting a really amazing combat experience. It should also be much more manageable in terms of the work we have yet to do. And the great thing about it is that nothing we’ve done so far is really rendered useless. We should still be able to use everything we’ve done so far, albeit maybe in a different way than we’d originally thought.
Other than that, it’s really just been a week of cracking down and digging into code for the most part, so we’ll go into specific progress:
Art
- Sofia created some new concepts for our village, both buildings and people, and one’s colored!
- Sofia also worked on a colored version of the character concept.
- Xy has finished modelling and UVing the player so textures are up next.
- Effie and Rudy worked on a logo and icon for the game.
- We’ve decided on references for each of the player’s sword forms.
- The Quartz sword will be based on a Jian from Chinese culture.
- The Ruby sword will be based on a Zweihander from European culture.
- The Sapphire sword will be based on a Wakizashi from Japanese culture.
Design
- We revised the scope of our project quite a bit, according to some comments from a faculty committee member.
- What we’re planning on now shouldn’t really change any of the work we have already done, but it should make the work we have left much more manageable.
Development
- John worked on the architecture for the Player’s Finite State Machine.
- This should help us avoid some input-related bugs where the player attempts to do multiple actions at the same time.
- Nick worked on the Player’s Block state, making sure that the transition from that to the Parry state was working properly and that the action actually worked.
- John finished the Dodge state and the Jump state and both states’ functionality.
- Rudy worked on implementing running, walking, idle, and jump animations into the game for our first playtest.
- Trent set up the scene in Unity for our Playtest, creating 2 different areas to to test different combat actions.
- Nick & John worked on fixing some bugs with the movement and jump functionality.
- Trent created an Analytics system to use for Playtesting.
Management
- We conducted a Playtest on Tuesday in class and gathered quite a bit of data to use to help refine our concept so far.
- We also ended our second Sprint on Tuesday, meaning we’ll be conducting a Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective to course-correct any issues we’re having with development.
- For this sprint, we also created a pre-release of our project, saving its current state to look back on in the future.
Documentation
- Kyle continued his work on the Lore Bible, adding more information about the Player’s Backstory.
- John worked on creating and revising a state diagram for our Player’s Finite State Machine.
- We all worked on refining our pitch presentation so that it could be given in a shorter format.
- Right now, this is primarily for a presentation to another class, but it should help later as well.
And that’s all for this week! We hope you’ve all been enjoying reading these, and thanks for following along!