Back again for another update, folks! It’s crazy that it’s already Week 9. It feels like just yesterday that we were doing our initial brainstorming for the project. This week included the end of a sprint and the start of a new one so, as usual, we conducted our Sprint Review, Retrospective, and Planning meetings. We’ve changed more of our process this sprint than usual because we’ve had some issues with time management in meetings and meeting topics in general, among other things, but nothing too big. And so far, the changes seem to be working really well.
Regardless, we don’t have as much development progress this week, as it’s been busy for everyone, but we’re still working. A lot of the development team’s progress this week was actually design-related. We’ve been working on revising and refinishing our ideas for the enemies in the game, and we’re really excited about what we’ve come up with. Hopefully by next week we have some concepts to show. We’ve also been working a lot on our pitch presentation. On Thursday, the 28th, all of the teams in the class are delivering a pitch to the faculty of the department and we’re trying to make sure we’re including everything that we want to include.
On the art side, we’re still working on iterating on sword concepts, but we’re getting very close now and we’re starting on modelling them as well. The player character’s model is also getting really close. At this point, most of Xy’s changes have been in response to nitpicks by the development team or things we weren’t sure on.
I think that’s about it though, so here’s our specific progress for the week:
Art
- Sofia updated the sword concepts again.
- We’re really close to final looks now and we also have side views.
- Sofia also made some more VFX concepts to help in attack animations.
- Xy updated the arch model they’ve been working on so that it can fit in the front of the village.
- Xy also updated the models for the Player Character, their Belt, and their Bracer.
- Effie iterated on the old health bar design based on a Confluence documentation explaining the intended design written by Kyle.
Design
- Everyone worked on brainstorming some new ideas for our enemies.
- Hopefully we have some concepts for these next week, but we’re excited for the new idea.
- Connected to the above, but we also did some brainstorming on boss mechanics and design.
- Hopefully we’ll be able to share more soon on that front as well.
Development
- Rudy did quite a bit of research this week on cross scene references in Unity.
- Nick & John both worked on cleaning up our GitHub Repository and Unity Project.
- We had a lot of remnants from previous sprints and playtests that hadn’t been deleted yet.
- Rudy and Effy worked on the cape simulation for our Player Character.
- Nick started working on a bug we’ve been seeing with how the player turns.
- Trent worked on programming a new system that would allow us to balance a lot of the data we need in the editor instead of in the code.
- John worked on updating our camera to a new system.
- It’s looking like it’s going to take a lot of tweaking, but it should work much better in the end.
Management
- Sprint Retrospective this week.
- We had more changes than usual this time.
Documentation
- Kyle wrote up an explanation of our health bar UI for our UI artist.
- Kyle also worked a lot on documenting our last 2 playtests.
- Both by creating spreadsheets documenting survey data and writing summaries of what happened and what we learned.
- Everyone also worked on our presentation quite a bit.
- We’re pitching to faculty on Thursday, the 28th.
And that’s everything for the week. Thanks again, everyone!