CAGD 370 Blogpost 2

Our team finished the second sprint, we have a lot of good progress but still have a ways to go before the prototype is complete. The good news is that all of the foundational elements are there and everything in the game works—at this point, we know that no matter what, we’ll have a functional playable prototype. Elements like skating, gliding, acorns, and the first level are all in the game. The next step is going to be looking at the game’s completeness, making sure there’s a good amount of other features. 

During this sprint, I made design documents for the HUD and power-ups, so that my team can have a good idea of what we’re going to be designing. I also coded in the acorns, and gave them a model. The acorn collection is a dynamic system that counts how many acorns are in the level at the game’s start, so this way, the designers can add more acorns to the level without worrying about breaking the HUD. I also wanted the acorns to look nicer than just deleting on touch, so now they quickly shrink and move towards the player, to indicate picking up.

Hand in hand with collectibles, I also set up the rest of the HUD, which included the speedometer and the timer. For the speedometer, I grabbed the rigidbody of the player and used its velocity, then rounded it. For the timer, I tried a formula to round it to two decimal places, but then it would jitter back and forth since it would truncate whenever there was a trailing 0. Fortunately I found a truncation function in the ToString() method, and set it to always only display two decimal places. I also made a model for the jump pack power-up that our programmer implemented. I know that art should be minimized, but there’s going to be at least three power-ups, so I think it’s useful to the player to have a way to distinguish between them. The model is also pretty simple.

We faced a couple of challenges during the sprint, the first was that kickoff was a little trickier since we didn’t have class time to do it. We distributed some work out over the weekend, but reviewed it and modified it slightly in person, where it was easier to discuss. When it came to our cards, we were better about splitting things down from the start, however, this led to some redundant cards.

Another challenge was that our level designer was out sick for a few days towards the end of the sprint, but fortunately he pulled through and got a blockout of the first level completed. While we had six cards left at the end of the sprint, we completed over twenty. The work we didn’t get to was the level flag, the dash powerup, and the second level map.

Going forwards, the next area of focus is going to be adding intractable objects to the levels beyond the existing collectibles and hazards. Once they are designed, the programmer can implement them, and the level designer can put them in the levels. We also need a system to load into levels from the main menu, as well as tracking stats, and saving player data. Currently, there’s also a few more power-ups to be coded in. When those features are done, the levels can be completed, and the game will be ready!