Everest Expedition - Sprint 2

  I have been working on the game “Everest Expedition” with my group members Ishmael and Dylan for the last two sprints. In all honesty, this most recent sprint, “Sprint 2” was not the best work that I could have done with the time I had put away. I was dealing with some difficult personal issues during this sprint and did not perform to the level that I know I am absolutely capable of. So for most of this blog post, rather than talking about what I did complete during this time, I am going to be talking about what I plan to do with my next sprint, since I know I can do better work than what was completed within these last two weeks. I will start off the post with what I got done and then converge into what I plan to have done by the next sprint, as this sprint was quite short in terms of cards completed, I would much rather focus on what I will be doing going forward from here.

For what I did during Sprint 2, I got our basic motion working. This means that I got our W and S keys to move the player forward and backward, and got the A and D keys to turn the player's body while they traversed the level. This caused much more of a problem than I ever thought it would have, as the rotation made the pickaxe or “arm” of the character freak out and caused a great deal of physics issues within the scene. In the end, I ended up recoding the pickaxe to move a bit away from the player's rigid body, and in doing this the player stopped having physics issues and was able to explore the level without any major bugs. With this, the player is able to walk around the levels and navigate to each puzzle without any issues causing the game to crash or break.

As for the more major part of my blog post, I want to talk about my future plans for this project. During this sprint, I had some major personal issues to deal with, and this caused me to greatly lack in the work that I was supposed to be performing for the end of our sprint. In the end, I only completed about half the number of cards that I had intended to finish when I first started the kickoff. While this is obviously a bad sign for how I’m working on the project, I plan to use this information to greatly improve my work in the next sprint.

Starting off the next sprint, I know exactly what I am expected to do, and have done a decent amount of research into collision systems to get my expectations down. Though I did lack a lot last week, I know what needs to be done and have a good estimate of how long it will take me to complete this work. I believe that in this knowledge, I will be able to perform how I had intended originally, and put out the kind of work that I know I am absolutely capable of. My plan for the next sprint of our project is to make up for all of the progress that I had left unfinished originally, and in doing that the project will hopefully be locked down and turn out exactly how it was intended. I know exactly which cards are taking president for this sprint, and I plan to have the important game mechanic cards finished before the playtest, whereas I will finish all the more want and wish cards after the playtest, since they arent as pivotal to the game.