The Apprentice Returns Sprint 3

 

 The Apprentice Returns: Sprint 3

By Joy Schulze

Role: Programmer

This sprint went excellently for me. I managed to do all of my tasks assigned at kick off and 1 extra task that I feel I was able to go above and beyond with.

My first task, which took up almost the first half of the sprint, was prepping the game for the playtest. This included making menus, creating a pause function, putting scenes in the build settings, making objects that could change scenes, and making sure that everything was in one continuous package. The only thing I didn’t do for the playtest was make the levels, and actually build the package (our designer wanted to do that after he tweaked some things).

After the playtest, I got to cleaning some things up. First of all, the player can die from losing all their mana now.

This also included implementing mana drain to the water staff which I used to test to see if using up the staff would kill the player as well. And then, now that our designer finished the inventory system, our ui now depicts which staff you’re holding. 

After that, I got to work on my favorite thing I worked on this sprint, the projectile enemy. This enemy was just supposed to shoot at the player, but I bounced some ideas off of our lead designer to make it more interactive.

First of all, it’s a flying enemy instead of a standing enemy. I felt that this would help differentiate it from the chasing enemy, and shield enemy that I got started on. I also decided that the enemy’s movement should be erratic to oppose the direct and static enemies we’ll have alongside it. To implement this, I made it so the enemy has a number of “move points” which are points in the world where the enemy can zip to after a randomized timer. Each instance of this enemy can have numbers and locations for their move points. This means that our level designer can build little arenas for this enemy to test the player’s movement and combat abilities.

I’m proud of this enemy, and my teammates were pretty impressed with how the enemy turned out. I wasn’t quite able to finish our shield enemy (and I didn’t make a little model for it yet so I have nothing to show), but that will be a fun endeavor as well. 

Next sprint, I’ll be implementing mana drain to all the other staffs, as well as adding some polish with things like a sprint, cracks for destroyable objects, and adding some visual flair to our staffs.

We’ve implemented most of the features that we’ve had planned, so these next few sprints will be polish, particles, balancing, and… art.