The Apprentice Returns: Sprint 1

  The Apprentice Returns: Sprint 1

By Joy Schulze

Role: Programmer

    This is my first experience working with an actual cohesive game development team on a long term project. While I've had other group projects where we've worked on games, I've been the one to do most of the work (not to toot my own horn). And the group I had before this was an excellent group, but our project was cut short due to us getting "fired". While I'm happy that I have a team who actually does other portions of the work, it does give me the feeling that I'm not doing enough. That being said, I did almost get all of my assigned tasks done this sprint, with the other tasks mainly being held up by the fact our lead designer had to rework the movement and camera.

    Since we all have to work on the game and I knew if we just winged it and worked on our own stuff it would get messy, my first order of business was to create a class map to try and get a basis for how we were going to delegate and build the game. At first we followed it pretty well; however, midway through the sprint we added some more cards for other features and had the aforementioned movement rework which caused us to loose a bit of clarity for each other's scripts. Overall, I feel that this class map only helped us a little bit in the beginning, and I feel I could have used my time doing something else. As the one who suggested we make and stick to a class map, I do take responsibility for wasting my own time and in the future I will likely not make a class map again unless it's a team wide effort that we plan out in detail and feel it's important to stick to it.

    The other non programming task I completed was creating the staff cards for our paper prototype. These were meant to detail how each staff worked so players would have a quick reference guide while playing the game. I also added little incantations that the players had to do to add a little bit of wizardly flair to our game. Overall, I feel that I did great with these cards... besides the fact that they didn't actually get used. So turns out our lead designer and our producer had very different ideas on how the paper prototype were going to be made, and when our producer made it, it led to players just not using the cards I made or staffs that our designer made.

    I feel that the work I did outside of the actual programming was a waste of my time, and that leads me to my first issue with our group; our plans have mostly been for the short term, and at worst completely spontaneous. While we have the overall vision, I feel like we don't have a concrete plan for everything we need to do yet. We've had to make more cards over the course of our sprint, and things we set up to use later end up getting canned before we can even try using them. However, now that I am mostly doing programming work, my contributions actually feel meaningful.

My gifs weren't uploading to blogger so it'll just be images

    The first things I did in unity, besides setting up github and test scenes for everyone, was work on some of the intractable objects in the environment. So far it's just been simple blocks you can destroy and blocks you can push to a predetermined location, but this did also require me to make simple test projectiles so I could actually ensure that these blocks could be interacted with.

  

    The next thing I implemented was the mana system we would be using. This was simple to make, however, the staff system hasn't been properly finished yet so it has not been fully implemented yet. Still though I was able to build upon it as I worked on the UI.

     So far our UI consists of a bar that shows the player how much mana they have, the staffs the player has currently equipped, and the basic controls so the player always knows what they're doing. The bar reacts to you mana value being changed, and the icons change depending on which staff you're holding. 

   

    One of the things I really wanted to get done, but just couldn't was the floating mechanic for the water staff. I was unable to even start on this due to the fact that our lead designer felt we needed to redo our movement completely... and it wasn't finished until the day before the sprint ended. While this frustrated me at first, I now realize that if we had done this later and I had implemented the floating and other movement mechanics, then I would have had to completely redo all of that as well. This was also the main reason I focused on more of the environmental and UI aspects of the game as I wasn't able to add new stuff to the character as it was changing.

    The only other thing that I didn't get done was a popup that appears above staffs on the ground that tells the player what they do and that one was on me and me alone.

    I feel like I haven't done enough work compared to my other team mates. I feel like they've both done far larger and more important aspects of the game while I've just been putting drops in the bucket. 

    However, I do feel that next sprint I will be making more worthwhile contributions. After I finish the last of the UI and the water staff, both with it's movement mechanic and it's attack, I will be implementing all of the enemies which I'm very excited for.