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Everest Expedition - Sprint 4 Review

Everest Expedition - Sprint 4 Review

My name is Kyle Ramser and I am currently working as a programmer on the game Everest Expedition for Computer Animation & Game Development 370. We just wrapped up our fourth two-week sprint and are now starting our fifth and final one. This sprint wasn’t my best overall since I had a lot going on during it, mostly in other classes, but it was still an improvement over the first two. To finish up our prototype we need to complete 15 points this week, so I am looking to finish 5-7 points by the end of this sprint to make sure that the prototype is as polished and finished as it can be by the third and final playtest.



As for what I did this sprint, I made a circle that tracks the mouse on the screen so that the player doesn’t get their cursor lost since the game involves a lot of quick and precise mouse movements. This didn’t give me too much trouble, but I was finding some issues with it when trying to implement it, mainly camera issues with the circle being locked to the X, Y, and Z coordinates of the camera. I completed the Google Form for our playtest so the players could have a feedback form to give us helpful info on what is good and bad about the prototype in its current state, which did not take long at all to finish, only really taking about 30 minutes to set up. The two cards that took the longest for me to complete were the state switch and scene setup. Both of these go hand in hand because, without the state switch script, it would be impossible for me to set up our main game scene. I had a little bit of trouble working with the event bus as this was the first time that I had ever used it, but after chatting with my teammate Dylan and having him teach it to me, I was able to complete the script after a few failed attempts.



For the scene setup, I had several problems getting the joint and pickaxe to work as I had intended, but after a few hours of trial and error, I was finally able to get them to function together. I also added in a few triggers in the level to switch between the climbing and exploring states, and both of these worked exactly how I had intended. With this addition, we now have every element set up in the main game scene, which means all there is left to do now is make the level longer and add in more climbing puzzles, which I am planning on working through in the fifth and final sprint.



There was one card that I was not able to complete, which was the power meter that lets the player know how much force they applied and therefore how high their jump will end up being. I feel like this will be a huge help for the players to be able to gauge how far they will be able to go and how much harder or softer they should be pulling the mouse. I am planning on completing this as the first card I do in sprint five. Overall I think this was far from my worst sprint but was not quite as good as my last one. With my most difficult and time-consuming cards out of the way, mainly the pickaxe and state switch cards as these took several hours more than most other ones, I think this next sprint will be a lot easier and I will be able to reach my goal of six or more points.


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