RPS - Sprint 3 Blog Post

 

RPS - Sprint 3

Compared to our last sprint, Sprint 3 was extremely successful for me, and we were able to gain a lot of information on how to improve our game and what step to take next. During the two weeks this sprint took place, I was able to finish many more cards than previous weeks. Though the cards were scored higher in the earlier sprints, I believe I still completed more work during this week and it was much more impactful on the outcome of our game. What I have added during this sprint was the hub world, NPCs for both the hub world and 1st level, a map for the second level, as well as a fix for the movement in our game, so that players do not feel as sluggish in game. On top of all of this, I fixed a lot of the mistakes and issues in our first level after the playtest, which I will go further into in a bit.

As for the hub world, I designed a lot more ideas for interesting platforming that players can mess around with when in between levels. I used combinations of wind jets, grappling hooks, and jump pads to make an exciting puzzle that the players can complete when exploring the hub, in order to make the hub world seem more alive and less like a glorified menu system. I also made the Upgrader NPC in a spot that can only be reached by completing puzzles, so the player must use what they have learned from the game to reach him and upgrade their skills. As for the NPCs, as I mentioned before, I deliberately placed the NPCs in locations that benefit from the dialogue that they used, such as the rock roll teacher nearby a ramp and the upgrader on top of a platform that must use paper form and grapple to be reached so that players can use what they learned and can figure out ways to traverse the world for themselves without being thrown in completely blind. As for the final two things that I completed during this time, I finished the annotated map for the second level, which uses a lot more of the puzzles in combination, and I improved the movement of our player so that it did not feel too slow, but was also not too fast where it would cause the player issues while platforming.

There were a few more things that I completed that were either still in progress at the end of the sprint or did not receive a card because they were small fixes after the playtest. As for what I was working on when the sprint ended, I was approximately halfway done with the second level, and the puzzles faced within it. I also completed some changes on the first level where players ran into issues in the playtest, including editing the ramp prefab so that it would launch players better and more smoothly, lowering and raising some values on the jump pads and wind jets around the map, and changing the grapple points so that players would not glitch into sides of blocks and walls, because this would happen on occasion. My first order of business with this new sprint will be to finish the second level, where I will then move on to adding in the NPCs and writing all their dialogue, as this level has a much more dense population of NPCs than the first one did. I believe that going forward I should be cranking out more cards than I did previously, because this last sprint got me on a bit of a roll and with some of the changes my teammates are making, I am even more excited to get in and make some more platforming puzzles for our players to enjoy.