Past the Halfway point…

We have finally passed the halfway point after this sprint. Overall this sprint felt slightly slower and was somewhat rough. But that was to be expected after spring break; it definitely can be challenging to get back to work after having a week of school off. It feels like we are walking on thin ice towards the end of this dev cycle. One wrong move, and we won’t finish the components that we want to have in the game. But I have a lot of faith in my team, and they are doing a great job under pressure.

For modeling, we got in more map assets for the level designers to finish out some more of our maps. This is super key, and we are starting to catch up on this front. I am excited to see them come in, and they look great. I cant wait to see our maps get built out because they are a vital feature in our game.

We also got our final version for the shield guard enemy, which was exciting to see. We are still very far behind on our character development, but every character we have been getting so far has come out well, and we are very excited to have them in our game.

For our art and animation team, we got some more icon art that will look awesome in the game. It will help the players understand their abilities better instead of just having placeholder text for the abilities. All the icons for the player abilities are now done, so that is another severe milestone of our game that will help our players better understand the elements of the game.

We also got in more animations for our enemies. We now almost have all the animations for our enemies, so we will start implementing them into our game so we can give our players an even more polished look.

On Our level design team, we got in our two first completed maps! They both look super awesome, and I’m thrilled with how they both turned out. We got in the Ocean map, which does feel like Kamino from star wars. And we got in the lost city map, which looks like a nuclear fallout may have happened many years ago. Both the level designers did a phenomenal job of capturing the environments’ atmospheres using the assets provided.

For programming, Tristin implemented a new difficulty system into the game to choose a difficulty based on their character’s skill tree level. Having this feature is fantastic to see because it adds another layer of progression to our game. Giving the players a new way to approach the game as their characters advance.

We also had Trevor working on the achievements page, which is coming along very well and is another crucial way to show player progression over time. Having these will give the players goals to shoot for and something to look back over as they progress through the game.

In conclusion, it feels like we could have accomplished more this sprint. I am still happy with the progress we did get in. At this point in the development cycle, I was hoping to have all the features implemented and just have the rest of our time to work on polishing; but that is not the case, and we have a bit more to do before we can ultimately reach the polishing stage. I am worried about the time we have left, but I think we can finish strong and have a complete game.