Zomb-Merge - Sprint 3

 Blog Post 3 - Zomb-Merge

My name is Kyle Ramser and I am currently a student in the Computer Animation and Game Development major at Chico State. I am focusing on level design and am currently working as the designer on a mobile game with the working title Zomb-Merge for the Mobile Game Development class 377. Our team, Graveyard, just finished up our third sprint out of seven sprints in the semester and had our first digital playtest during this sprint. So far, we are a bit behind our ideal schedule, but now that the game is functioning and the major scripts have been implemented, the rest of our sprints should be able to pick up the pace a bit and put the game in a good place by the end of the process.

As for the work that I completed this sprint, it was definitely somewhat lackluster. I had a very long week and did not put in quite as much time as I should have, but was able to put out some of the cards I had assigned. All in all, I have gotten the level completely laid out with all the different backgrounds, as well as the board and UI for my programmer to use. This means that from now on, while I am a level designer, I am going to have to try my hand at programming and art which I am not quite as good at. I am definitely going to need to do some research to learn how to do certain things in C#, and I have been looking through how to create a functioning pause menu with controls already since I created the UI for it in the last sprint. Now that the game is fully functioning, I can build off the code that my programmer implemented already and add in the smaller, extra functions in the upcoming sprint such as the attack button and upgrade menu.

As for what I was able to complete this sprint, I made the app icon for the game, which in theory would be easy but without a huge grasp on art, especially 2D digital art, it took me a bit longer to make something that I believed would work for a logo. Still, it is a work in progress and will need to be looked over by our producer, who is better with art, so that he can add to it and tweak it up a bit more. I also finished adding all of the backgrounds for the different cities so that rather than every battle seeming like it’s in the same place, it will give the player the sense of changing locations between cities. I also retextured all the backgrounds to add some more differences between them.

For our playtests this sprint, we were mainly looking to see if our core mechanic was working well and if it was any fun to play. While we got a lot of feedback that it was difficult to tell which squares were moving where because of a lack of animations, the mechanic itself did function. Most of our playtesters agreed that it definitely needed some work, but that the mechanic functioned and the idea was unique and interesting.

Next sprint, I am looking to do more than I did this time. I am going to need to do a lot of research into programming to make sure I can make everything function smoothly in the game, and I am looking to playtest more often than just once a sprint to make sure that the most significant changes are done well. So overall, not my best sprint, and this next one is going to take some work, but after reevaluating the process we have been going through, I want to make some changes and come back better.