Zomb-Merge - Sprint 6

Zomb-Merge - Sprint 6

My name is Kyle Ramser, and I am a Chico State student majoring in Computer Animation and Game Development. I am currently taking a mobile development class, and am working on a game with the working title Zomb-Merge. Our team just finished up our 6th sprint, which is the last full-length sprint that we have in our process. This was by far our best sprint, and we were able to get the game essentially ready to ship, with only a few things that still need to be added and tweaked. We definitely set ourselves up for success in our final sprint during this one and I couldn’t be more excited to finish the game off.

As always, I’ll start off by explaining what went wrong during this sprint. I had an incredibly difficult time setting up the health and transitions, as I am not the best at programming. I had to talk over both of these cards with my programmer and had to redo a lot of the code that we already had in the game. Since both the health and transitions work off one another, I was forced to get both working at the same time in order for either one to work. This experience definitely taught me a lot about programming and, in the end, it turned out exactly as I had envisioned it, so it was less of something that went wrong, and more of an obstacle that I was able to overcome along with my programmer. We did have a few miscommunications on cards during the sprint, but I was able to talk with my programmer and fix some doubled-up cards, where two group members were doing the same work without knowing it, before it became a big problem.

As for what went well this sprint, I was able to add everything that we had intended to include at the beginning of the process, and we now have time for bug fixing and some wish cards such as original music and sound effects. The first two cards that I completed were the health and transition cars, which took up a large portion of the sprint but were well worth the time and work put in. Now, when defeating a city, the health goes down over time depending on the score that your horde is at currently and once the city dies, it sinks into the ground and the next city fills in the spot, which has a higher health pool than the last. After implementing this, I put the models that my producer made into Unity and plugged them into the transition system so the cities looked more complete and finished. I also changed the Google form to ask questions pertaining to the balancing of the cities’ health amounts versus the player’s damage. I ran playtests outside of class to get more info on the balance and in this next sprint I am planning to balance out the health of the cities.

Overall, I am proud of my team and of myself for the work that we were able to complete this sprint. The game looks complete and feels fun to play, with pretty high replayability that makes the game fun for a long time, even with how simple it is. I was able to set myself up in a good position for the next sprint so that I could make the music for the game, all of the sound effects, and the options menu to make the game finally complete. I am excited to release it and can’t wait to receive the feedback given by the students in other game development classes.