This semester I was chosen to be the team’s designer for a game in our 470 Video Game Production class. My game is a top-down beat-em-up called The Drop. In the game, you play as a hypebeast who fights other hypebeasts for the privilege to buy luxury clothing items and resell those same items. The goal of the first sprint was to create our backlog, paper prototype, and project setup in order for us to get a better idea of what the game will look like. My work for the sprint revolved around designing a paper prototype and getting the project set up in Unity. 

The cards I had for project setup were setting a Unity project up with GitHub version control, creating a 3rd person controller, and 3rd person camera that tracks the player. Each of these was a 1-point task that did not take me too long to complete. Since Unity’s old collaboration system is gone, any collaborative project I do will use a GitHub repository. The only issue with this task was teaching my group members how to link their Unity projects to the repository. Creating a 3rd person controller also did not take long, with the only challenge being creating the smooth directional turns for the player so there is no snapping to positions. Although the camera setup was easy to create at first, I ran into an issue with how it would update and lag behind the player, leading to frame issues where the player’s position would appear to be flickering before it updated. This was fixed by attaching the positional update of the camera to Unity’s LateUpdate function so the position of the camera would not be done until the end of the frame. 

The cards I was assigned for the paper prototype were creating the rulesheet, assembling pieces for the paper prototype, and designing a feedback form for the playtesters of the prototype. Since the game is going to be top-down, I did not need to do a whole lot to translate it into a board game, so assembling pieces was easy. I used a DnD grid board to draw the map and copied the tutorial level’s annotated map for the layout. With the rulesheet, the only challenge was finding a way for multiple players to play within the game. I accomplished this by having one player control all of the enemies present on the board. The simpler prototype limited the number of questions I could ask playtesters, but when creating it I made sure to put important questions to see if the playtesters were part of the target audience and whether they thought the goals of the game were clear. 

Despite the fact that I did make progress in setting up the progress and fleshing out the game idea a bit more I believe I could have done more this sprint. There definitely not a ton of work for me to do, but I felt that I could have at least gotten a head start on work for the next sprint. I plan to increase the amount of work I do over in upcoming sprints.