The Apprentice Returns: Sprint 4

 

 The Apprentice Returns: Sprint 4

By Joy Schulze

Role: Programmer

This sprint took the wind out of our sails. We thought all of our stuff was functional, but then we had some issues merging our branches and some of our stuff not merging properly. We got some stuff done, but we had to stop just about everything to go into bugfixing mode.

As for the stuff I did get done, I made an enemy that creates a wall. This will be used to challenge our player to navigate around the shield to defeat it or the enemies that it’s shielding. It can also be used to block paths and make shortcuts. Enemies are unaffected by the wall so players will not be able to fight until they deal with the enemy. I’m very happy with this enemy in the way it works, and its visuals. I can’t draw hands, but I can model some crappy 4 fingered ones pretty quickly.

Next I made variants of all the different enemy types, which was simple recoloring and adjusting values.

The normal enemies are the white and grey ones, the black and red ones are faster and more aggressive, the blue ones can only be killed by fire, the red ones can only be killed by ice or water, and the big metal ones have more health. They’re neat, but I honestly don’t see the designers' vision with these ones. I’ll have to see how they’re incorporated into the levels in order to see what he’s cooking up.

The most important thing I worked on and had to redo a couple of times (for reasons we’ll talk about later), was implementing the mana drain. Now that we had all of the staffs, I was able to make them all drain the player’s mana when they’re used. We had some issues once we realized our designer’s inventory system was pushed to a different branch from the one we were working on, and there has been a strange occurrence where a single staff in a single scene will not work and we can’t find out why or recreate it, but other than that it works and it’s really easy for our designer to tool the values and balance them.

The mana drain was the final “need” that I was assigned. We’ve made enough progress to the point where we’re running out of stuff to do besides balancing, polish, and wants. We were feeling incredible after the end of the first week of our sprint.

The first “want” I set up was a level complete screen that displays how much mana the player used as a sort of ranking system, and keeps track of player collectables (that our designer is going to implement soon). Then, we got started on getting our game ready for the playtest and everything broke.

We had so many merge issues and bugs as we started compiling all of our stuff for the playtest. We had all been working in our own branches and we were finally putting everything into the devline. The problem was that not everything made it into the devline, and me and our producer were not aware of this until we were getting ready to build. It ended up leaving us with a wonky playtest that left us with more bug reports than feedback. However, these bugs were all logged, and we started fixing them for the rest of the sprint.

Thankfully, we didn’t have any needs left in our assigned work, so we were able to put all of our energy towards fixing these bugs. While not all of them are fixed, we have a stable project that I wish we had for the playtest. I don’t have any more bugs to fix on my end, so I’m going back to polishing the game next sprint. I have some visuals that I can implement like making all the staffs look unique and making them spin on the ground, then we have some funny stuff that we’re adding like lore and voice acting that will help our prototype stand out.

This sprint taught me proper github etiquette and the importance of actually verifying our work to test it. I felt pretty bad during our playtest and while we were fixing our build. It felt like everything we made only worked in our branches, but it all worked so perfectly that we didn’t think to do further testing. We don’t have anything really intense coming up next sprint (unless we go crazy on the art to Dan’s dismay) so it sucks that we’ll be testing on stuff that doesn’t matter as much as the stuff that did matter. At least we learned our lesson.