RPS Sprint 4

RPS Sprint 4 - Blog Post 4

So far in the process of designing our game, we’ve gone through a lot of ups and downs, as most projects go, but I believe we are making great progress on the game and it is turning out better than we had imagined. A lot of things have been adjusted in our game, which is a good and bad thing, because the movement mechanics and how they feel when exploring levels are drastically different and better received than in the beginning of the project, but in doing this we had to shift attention for what we were working on and how the levels were laid out multiple times. As the Level designer, this was difficult to deal with, but it was far more worth it to deal with these issues and change the forms, than to leave them as they were, which was not nearly as fun to play around with than it is now.

The center of the level with an NPC placed at the start to give guidance to players. (Bottom Left)
Door in back requiring keys obtained from challenges to open.

As for directly bad sections of our process, earlier on in the process, I experienced a loss which ended up greatly affecting the progress I made on the game, and put us off course in the first sprint. We were behind by a lot because of this, and had our work cut out for us going past this. As we continued on, I was able to pump out a lot more work than the first two week sprint, and we got our game back on track. While the adjustments to the forms and the addition of the grapple did change a lot, I wouldn’t take this as a fully negative thing that happened, because while changing the level around was a bit of work, it did not take too long and had a massive positive affect on our movement mechanics, which was the main focus for this game in the first place. And with that, I will delve into the positives that occurred during the development. This fourth sprint has been one of our best to date I believe. We got lots of positive feedback on the game so far, and got a lot of useful information for things that need to be adjusted to smooth out the feel of the game.

Example of some of the NPC Dialogue I wrote.

During this sprint, I finished the entirety of our second designed level, including the layout, platforming challenges, NPC layouts and dialogue, and, after the playtest, the refinements to the level to make it smoother and more fun to play. On top of this, I finished our annotated map for the final level, and began work on the gray boxing for the level. Overall, I think this is a fairly decent amount of work, and I was able to pull it back a bit from the first sprint, which was not my best work. Going into the next sprint, I plan to complete the final level, and go back through all 3 levels to add in some combatants for players to fight now that the enemies are fully functioning.

Annotated map for the final level.

I think looking back at the full process so far, my teammates have been doing some astounding work, and while I didn’t start off too strong, I think in the last few sprints I was able to pull it back and get a lot more work done than before. I really like the way the game is shaping up and think that by the end of this sprint, we will have a fully functioning prototype that not only has the movement mechanics we are supposed to add, but will be fun to complete as well, since that is our main goal in Game Development after all.