Zomb-Merge - Sprint 1

 Zomb-Merge - Sprint 1

My name is Kyle Ramser, and I am currently attending Chico State for Computer Animation and Game Development. I am currently working on a mobile puzzle and merge game under the working title “Zomb-Merge.” My team and I just finished our first sprint in the development process, and as far as my work goes, I think I did a pretty good job setting up all of the level design components so that my programmer and producer, working as an all-around assist with art, programming, and level design, can complete their work to get the first iteration of the game working. I did run into a few issues in this sprint that ended up leaving me blocked from progress, but overall I think I was able to make the most out of my time and do some good work.

Scene Layout - Separated to add depth to the game view

To get the bad out of the way first, I will begin this post with the issues that I ran into during my time in this sprint. The main problem that stopped a large amount of my progress was that I got blocked at one point with a lack of cards and there wasn’t any programming implemented into the game yet, so a lot of the core mechanics that I had made the level and block outs for were not quite implemented yet. Beyond this, a lot of the cards that I could have completed even without any programming were assigned to someone else, so at this time I felt like I was trapped without cards to do. In hindsight, it was definitely due to a bad kickoff with miscommunications with my producer, and beyond this as soon as I felt blocked I should have taken more cards than just the few I had added so that I could continue making progress on the project. The few other problems that I had were having to remake the paper prototype after trying it and realizing the balancing was far off, and with a change to a core mechanic part way into the sprint, I had to readjust to the new version of the game and rebuild what I had started before.

Layout for the full game - not yet fully complete

With the issues I had out of the way, on to the positives of our first sprint. I feel like the work that I did do on this sprint was pretty high quality, and I was able to do enough work to have the main game scene fully ready to be used. The major cards that I completed were making the paper prototype, laying out the board for the puzzle area, fully texturing it, adding a simple iteration of the UI, and implementing a block out of the horde and cities so that my programmer is able to use them to start scripting. The paper prototype was definitely the most time-consuming of the cards that I did, but I think that it paid off a lot for the future of our game. I think it came out just as I had envisioned it, and it gave the team a lot of information on whether or not the game was balanced and, most importantly, fun.

Simple board layout for paper prototype.

So overall, I believe that this was a shaky start to our process. We had a lot of issues to iron out as a team, but I think that by the end of the sprint, we really had our communication down and were working better as a team. I’m happy with the work that I did during this 2-week sprint, though thinking back I believe I could have finished more and will be looking to do that next sprint.