Production Blog 6

During this last sprint of stumblebumps, we endeavored to get all the major gameplay content in the game and also polish the user experience significantly. Sadly, we weren’t able to fully achieve all of these goals. Our velocity slowed down a little and it caused us to not be able to fully implement all the features we would’ve wanted. Many many programming issues were encountered throughout the past two weeks, and it caused significant delay in the polishing process

Here are the stats we have for the sprint.

Points Assigned: 169

Points Verified: 98

Points in Verify: 0

Points in Complete: 98

Cards Assigned but not moved: 38

We were significantly ahead of our ideal velocity, but this sprint knocked us back a bit, putting us closer to that line. It’s not all bad, because we are still ahead of where we needed to be originally, but with the scope we’re aiming for and that we are putting on ourselves to reach at the end of the semester, it’s going to be a hefty 7th sprint for our team.

3D Artists:

I wanted to try and pivot the artists away from making more cosmetics (especially because of the slowdown of programming systems), so I asked them to make more background props. Specifically, I worked with them to figure out the assets we would need to make a bathroom scene to use for the water-themed levels that we have. We hope that this difference in background will provide some nice visual contrast during gameplay. We still had some cosmetics come through that will hopefully add some more customization. Many of them are holiday/festive themed or referencing other popular things, which hopefully will let people be able to choose their favorite

During this sprint, we had Martin work on a significant number of systems, many of which weren’t able to get finished because of bugs on top of bugs. For instance, when trying to set up the menu navigation, he ended up having to create an entirely new player controller and spent several hours trying to figure out the issue of why we couldn’t get controller support for the menus. It turned out that the way we had the player controllers set up for local multiplayer and not having 1 player designated as the menu navigator made it way harder.

Shane also finished up the color-matching minigame scripts, allowing us to set up that particular level, but there is a pretty decent chance we won’t get to implementing it simply to prevent anything from breaking. We also set up the ability to go back from the player selection menu, but there is a bug where if you have 2+ players in the menu, it will crash the game. You are also able to go back while within a game itself, but that is also subject to the same bug.

Lastly, there was also the teddy bear bouncing and collisions, which are going to be used in a level as a fun jumping section.

Level Design/Other

Our level designers spent the sprint making adjustments to the levels they had already set up and working on the background scene setup. This will allow us to control the lighting and the overall visuals of the game. We didn’t want to have the default unity skybox and using the props this way would let us express the visual flair that we already have.

Aside from the level designer work, we had some extra animations being set up and VFX that will play on certain events like animations or on hitting objects like bouncers. We also set up the poster and 2D art for the game’s promotional materials. 

Overall the sprint took a bit of a bad turn, but I do think that the team has been trying their best to get these features and polish in. The gameplay itself has proven to be very fun to those who have tried it, at this point it’s simply a matter of UX and making sure that our final build is set up as best it can be.