Zomb-Merge - Sprint 5

Zomb-Merge - Sprint 5

My name is Kyle Ramser and I am currently attending Chico State as a Computer Animation and Game Design major. I am in Mobile Development and, with my team ”Graveyard”, I am working on a mobile game for android devices with the working title “Zomb-Merge.” We just wrapped up our 5th sprint of the process and we are moving on to our 6th. I think that overall this was not our strongest sprint, especially with a few of the hiccups that happened during it, but we are most definitely on our way to finishing by the 7th and final sprint.

I always like to start off with what went wrong during the sprint, and this one had some big issues. During the process, we had a huge miscommunication that ended up about as poorly as it could have: a merge error. Because of this, I lost a huge chunk of my work and had to spend a good amount of time reimplementing work that I had already completed. Luckily, a good chunk of the time that I used was researching how to do the work rather than actually typing and making changes, so putting all of it back in wasn’t too difficult on its own. The other big issue is that I ended up getting sick over the weekend, which made me unable to go to class and made it difficult for me to work. Because of all of this, I wasn’t able to get too much work completed during this sprint. I was able to learn from this and from now on our team will be communicating every time that they enter Unity on a branch and which branch of the project they’re working in. This will hopefully stop us from losing progress due to slight communication issues as we did.

As for the good, I was able to finish off the attacking script and add the tutorial to the game. For the tutorial, I opted for a simple text tutorial telling players how to play the game, as the game itself is very self-explanatory. To achieve this, I added some more buttons to the main menu to bring up a tutorial menu that tells the player what they are doing. For the attack script, I made it able to display the damage numbers for each of the cities, functionally attack, send the players to the losing scene if their damage is too low, and move on to the next city if they win, where the new damage value is displayed. On top of this, I also got far into making the health bars function as I wanted them to. This was much more difficult than I had originally thought it would be, and I ended up needing to do a few hours of research and trial and error to get anywhere near what I had originally planned. Now that I have done the research I used coroutines to make the health bar drop by whatever amount the player’s damage number was at over a few seconds. While it isn’t fully functional yet, I have done most of the work for it, and it will be the first card I finish in the next sprint.

So overall, this sprint had its speed bumps for sure. Getting sick and losing a lot of my work was definitely not helpful, and I underestimated the difficulty of the health bars. Next sprint, I am going to finally put all the work that I put into the health system on the board and I am going to make absolutely sure that the team communicates well when they are entering and leaving a branch to keep from having any more work lost for no reason.