Floor Plans and Forges

What an absolute monster of a sprint, with a damp squib of an ending.  The majority of my focus on the sprint was to wrap up character controller improvements and implement later-stage changes to the game design document. Over the course of Sprint 3, we realized that our game didn't have enough compared to both other people's projects and in terms of a unique movement mechanic. This was problematic, and we set out to make new cards in order to remedy this issue. We decided to slowly drop the idea of a fruit-based golf game and instead focus on what testers actually enjoyed; jumping and moving around freely. As it turns out, players don't like arbitrary limits that strangle their ability to play the game how they want.  Freedom! Over the course of sprint 3, and into sprint 4, we worked on providing more options to the players, allowing people to make a more precise jump using the ground slam ability, creating a charge arrow to indicate direction, and adding keybinds to chang...

 What a playtest! This sprint was a big come-to-jesus moment for the team; essentially, the focus was on tightening what we wanted from the game and develop towards something meaningful. We acknowledged what wasn't working and what was too vague and attempted to remedy it. We met three days in a row, drafting new cards, figuring out what we needed, and focused on strict prioritization. Everything we needed for the playtest was given its own separate category and prioritized first as a 'mini-sprint'. All of these were completed in time, and it paid off.    The mini sprint label we used to tasks that needed to get done before the playtest. My focus for this sprint was to further tighten up the controls, revamping everything so that the player felt good to control. I made it so that the fruit always moved in the direction of where the camera pointed, making it feel more organic. I set up the camera to pan in and out when the player was ready to jump. I also added a 'slam...

I hope the next time my team lead sees me programming some esoteric bullshit, she tazes me in the neck. Not to start this sprint recap off with negativity, of course. I feel as if the amount of cards I had to complete were completely disrupted by my need to completely overengineer a solution to a problem that didn't exist. This is entirely on me and something I should've brought up beforehand. When I started discussing this problem with my groupmates, I realized how ridiculous it all sounded in my head, and now I feel like I have a clearer idea of what I need to do. So let's go into it. I put myself in charge of me getting a robust physics objects system in the game. This meant, for me, a need to create an elaborate and robust object spawning system, where designers could put values in a spreadsheet and have them instantly transfer over to the game on runtime, with a GPU-friendly batch spawning system that. . . Yeah, you can see the problems here, can you? We can count the ...