470 Sprint 5

 I wish this sprint went better. A lot of the things I accomplished over the course of this sprint were in an incomplete state and I just didn't feel right turning them in. It's telling that afterwards, I had about 4-5 points I could easily attach work to that I just didn't.

 



The biggest amount of work came to creating this last build. I put in a lot of effort to get as many things working as possible. There were a few last minute changes and discoveries that ended up fixing our game for the better; I think most important ended up being the capture zone rework. Initially, I thought it'd make sense for the capture zone to work like everything else that's damageable in the game. But, that didn't really pan out. It was too clumsy and the health system I used didn't scale well at all for being used as an objective. Instead, I set it up so that it was an area that had a timer that decreased in value, and decreased faster based on how many enemies were present in it. This was huge and felt so much better from a gameplay perspective.

 


Another cool discovery was finally learning how to use the navmesh obstacle component properly; initially, I had it in my head that we had to bake the navmesh again for every new object inserted into it. This would've been untenable in the much larger map that Robert had intended, and so it was a blessing to find that the obstacle would create zones that create gaps in the navmesh and repair themselves once removed. This gave us the ability to do a lot of things, like create breakable gates that enemies can move past once done. Now I have to rework all placeable traps to fix them, yay!!

 



Still, I'm proud of where we're at once this sprint ended. I wish I did more, but I always wish I could do more. I just feel like I never do enough and the things I manage to get done are just not worth celebrating. These blogs end up being the hardest part of the process, because just going over everything I've done makes me really sad. I feel like I'm capable of more, but I just can't reach it yet. I want to take the effort to really put a bow on this and really make sure that Robert is able to make the game he wanted. I want to walk away from this semester happy, for once. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

470 Sprint 2

Image
   This sprint was a strange one; I had to do my absolute best to work out a system for enemies and an attack system at the last minute. I felt like I could've done better in sections; you can see in the gifs below that there's two major issues with enemy movement. Knockback on enemies looks ugly; it's just a backwards motion. I didn't want to use the Unity physics system because it sucks and encourages everything around it to break. However, for purely aesthetic purposes, it may be what I have to use. Transform.Translate just doesn't cut it. Enemy movement in general is something I wish I could've improved. As of right now, it's just so boring. They fall into a single file line, swarm into the nearest target, and then move onto the next one. While I could perhaps cope with the look of it resembling a pack of locusts descending on a field, I just can't sit with it in this state. I hope I get an opportunity to return to it in time to make it look better. ...
Read more

470 - Sprint 1

Image
 This sprint was a successful first step, but I feel like we were limited by two distinct things.  One is that we didn't necessarily have a prepared backlog. This lead to us being assigned a minimum of work to do, and it took a while to get some wider context on the things we had to do. Second, a significant amount of our group got sick and it kind of limited the things we could really do. There was a huge pause on the programming side especially as I was left to focus mostly on enemy spawners. This was kind of a bummer, but I made some progress on it and I was proud of my coding. I've had a lot of trouble in the past with decoupling my code. It's just too easy for me to take shortcuts and create an architectural mess that just doesn't work out at all longer term. This time, I really took the time to learn from my mistakes and I worked to create an event-based system for spawning. That way, things can be tested without necessarily having everything in scene, and I doubl...
Read more