This week went by quickly. We started off with the end of a sprint on Tuesday, so we had our normal Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective, and Sprint Planning meetings. We didn’t end up changing a lot this time, but we did have a few things, mostly related to the problems we’ve had with how slowly we’ve been reviewing new work. We updated some things in our Discord so that we get notifications specifically for work that’s ready to be reviewed, and so far that seems to be helping.
After Tuesday, our progress stalled a bit because we were all working on other classes, but towards the end of the week we picked it up and ended up getting quite a bit done. We’ve made significant progress on most of the challenges we want to implement for this playtest to test the player’s various combat actions, and we finally have temporary animations in for all of those combat actions as well. We also made some changes to the architecture of our project too, adding a new system for object management. To help document these changes more effectively, we’ve also started using Confluence.
On the art side, this week was a week of iteration. The Player’s model received some updates to texturing and a small update to the model itself, changing the belt from metal to rope. The sword concepts have also been updated, adding color and starting to unify the design of the sword hilts. The Player’s rigging has been updated too, and work on animations with that rigging has begun as well.
More specific progress is detailed down below:
Art
- Xy updated the Player model’s bump map and textures.
- Xy also iterated on the Player’s bracer model.
- Sofia iterated on the Player’s sword concepts.
- Effy updated the rigging and worked on a walking animation.
- Effy updated the rigging and worked on a walking animation.
- Effie created an initial version of the in-game HUD design, including a health bar and a side menu for displaying the active gemstone.
- The HUD design includes the health bar and the side menu for displaying the active gemstone and its ability states.
Design
- Kyle continued working on the design of our new playtest scene.
- Specifically, the placement and number of challenges.
- We’re now doing 3 of each challenge to help player’s learn skills more effectively.
Development
- John finished up the dodge animation, updating the player’s collider to reflect the action of the animation.
- Nick continued working on the improved prototype scene from last week.
- Kyle worked on actual populating the new playtest scene with things that we’ve been working on.
- Nick programmed the interactions for our challenge that is meant to emulate the boss’s sweep move.
- Rudy finished the first version of the Multi-Scene editor he’s been working on.
- It gives us a more organized way of opening multiple scenes at the same time.
- John updated one of our scripts that makes enemies move between 2 points.
- It can now move between more points and we can assign those points easier.
- Trent implemented our temporary block animation.
- We now have all of the animations that we can implement so far, implemented.
- They’re all temporary since we don’t have our actual character model yet, but we needed something to show what’s going on more effectively.
- John programmed the interactions for our challenge that is meant to emulate the enemy’s attacks.
- Trent started implementing a new system for managing objects in our game and referencing them based on IDs.
- It should help simplify a lot of interactions between objects like the player and enemies.
- Specifically, it stops a single attack from damaging the same object multiple times.
Management
- We all took part in a Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective, and Sprint Planning meeting at the beginning of the week.
- Last sprint went pretty well, but we still had a few updates to make.
- Rudy set up a page for us on Confluence.
- This should help us maintain documentation (both technical and design) in a much more organized way.
- Once again, everyone on the team worked on creating and defining more cards in our task board.
Documentation
- Rudy wrote a page on Confluence detailing how his Multi-Scene editor functions and how to use it.
- Trent wrote a page on Confluence for the Object Management System.
- Trent wrote a page on Confluence for the Analytics system built for the previous Playtest.
So that’s it for our progress during Week 7 of the Fall semester. This week we’ll be doing 2 more playtests, hoping to get some more detailed info on how well the current design of our combat actions work in situations similar to the one’s we’re planning on having in the game.