Design Work: 

The second prototype of The Drop was created during sprint 5. While I believe this prototype did improve upon the issues that the first electronic build had, as a designer I wanted more levels that were present in the second build of the game in order to test the design of the later levels. The next level after the tutorial level did have a map with a layout, but it was not updated with the latest buildings nor were they correctly oriented. 

Although we did not get all of the desired levels into the latest build, there were several design changes made during the last sprint. First, the power-up and side objective systems have been scrapped in the interest of time. While I did really want to develop and test these features, from a production standpoint we need to finish the art and fix the issues currently in the game. I believe that the design changes that did make it into the latest build will help with making the game more fun for our players. One of these changes is to make the money players collect from defeating enemies “magnetic” so players can collect cash faster. In addition, if a building is too close to the camera, it will become transparent so that players will be able to see their current location if they walk behind a building. 

Programming Work: 

I still completed a lot of work during the fifth sprint. A significant proportion of the tasks I was assigned to do in this sprint were related to design work. These included programming the tutorial so it can properly teach players, the aforementioned money magnetism and building invisibility, and updating the player feedback form to better reflect the changes made in the second prototype. 

For programming the tutorial I set up multiple colliders along the main street. Each of these colliders would communicate with the game’s user interface to give players tips on how to play when they would walk through them. While this work’s for now I may improve this in the future by either adding images or better incorporating the mechanics into the design of the tutorial so that players can learn the game without reading so many lines of text. Improving the money feature did not take long as the asset and the collision were already done. The additions needed to create the “magnetism” were a spherecast to detect if the player was close enough to the dollar bill and a transform position function to move it towards the player. Originally I was not sure how to tackle the building's invisibility; I knew it would involve checking the distance between the building and the camera as well as calling the mesh renderer component, but I was not sure how to connect them. However, this proved to be a lot easier as I did not need to experiment with raycasting from buildings and instead can just measure the physical distance to the camera and check if it is too short. If the distance between the camera and building is too short, the building will become semi-transparent allowing players to see past it. 

The other chunk of work I contributed to the game this sprint were adding assets to the clout and money meters, and programming all of the animations in the game. The assets for the clout meter were given to me in the last sprint so the functionality was already there. However, adding and moving the hat was not something I have done before. What I did to get the hat moving up and down the bar was to change its rect transform position on the screen based on how filled the health bar was. Again, since the functionality was already implemented all I needed for the money meter was to add the asset. Unfortunately, one was not created in time so I took it upon myself to create a 2D stack of money to use. For the animations, I added an animator component for both the enemies and the player. Since they use the same animations I did not need to create multiple and instead was able to call the same booleans from their respective scripts so that their animations could play when needed. While the animations do work, I ran into some bugs, primarily with the enemies standing in place, but still running. In the upcoming sprint, I will work to iron out these bugs so that the animations can feel smooth and responsive for our players. 

As I mentioned earlier, I could not complete some cards due to the art not being complete so I also created two more 2D assets: a crowbar and a brick. These will appear on the screen when players acquire these items so that they know when special attacks are available and what buttons to use to activate them. 

While I wish the second build of the game was better, I still believe that I provided sufficient work for the game in sprint 5.