Blog Post 3

 This third sprint was by far our most successful and productive sprint. We were able to amplify our momentum from the previous sprints by having a decent groundwork and a basic knowledge of what made us work efficiently or inefficiently.

In my opinion, one of the main things that made this sprint efficient was the way I wrote the cards. After trial and error from the previous two sprints, I finally wrote cards that were effective for my designer and programmer. The cards were simple enough that my team members did not have to think about the extent to which they might need to work on the cards, meaning that the features and work that was given was clearly outlined. But, the cards were also simple enough that it allowed my team members to take the approach that they thought best fit the task.

Another thing that assisted us in being able to complete a lot of work was having a better understanding of exactly how much work we needed to complete by the end of the fifth sprint. This was yet another issue that derived from my lack of experience when it came to being a producer. At the beginning of the sprint, I had not completely written out all of the cards in the backlog that would be necessary for us to complete the prototype that we desired to complete. So, when we looked forward to the next sprints, it became unclear what we wanted to do in terms of focus and scope for each sprint. I was able to write nearly if not all of the cards that would bring us to a completed prototype in the fifth sprint, and that aided me in understanding how much work I needed to assign my groupmates. 

The goal that I set for this sprint was that we as a group would be able to implement all of the movement features that we would want in the game by the end of the sprint. For the most part, we reached that mark. The kinesthetics prototype helped us understand where our game fell short, where it felt wonky and unresponsive, and what was enjoyable about the mechanics. We implemented a grappling hook, a paraglider, and the ability to climb walls. 

The versions of these abilities that players were able to test in our playtest were extremely rough. We learned that the simple act of moving around and walking felt very slippery and not “tight” enough as the players might have wanted. We also learned that there were a handful of bugs that players would experience as soon as we had expanded our playtest to a larger audience than just our self-playtesting. However, we easily rectified those bugs once we had more time on our hands to spend on ironing them out. 

The work I personally completed this playtest was a fair amount. I implemented a paraglider that applied a very light upwards force on the player if they held space while mid-air. This feature was very cumbersome when we had the playtest, for a lack of better words. There was no ability to toggle it off if the player accidentally pressed it mid-air, it made the player feel far too floaty which compounded the previous issue of the movement feeling slippery, and there was a lack of visual representation. The player could not tell when the paraglider was active. It also conflicted with the grappling hook, making the player’s aerial movement much slower than intended. After the playtest though, I added a prefab that would be set active whenever the paraglider was toggled. I also allowed the player to hold the space button midair for the paraglider to be active, and let go of space for the paraglider to be inactive.

I spent a good chunk of the sprint fixing bugs that were caused by other features, as well. I reworked the player jump so that it was based on raycasting instead of collision, so that there would be a more reliable system that allowed the player to jump without worrying about tagged objects or weird geometry. I added simple lines of code that helped make the player have more drag when they are grounded, so that they would decelerate faster when they stopped moving. I also added some code that capped the player's max movement speed so that the player would not continually accelerate. I added scriptable objects that would be attached to item prefabs later on so that we could have an inventory system for the player.

The next sprint, I plan on having our team focus on the inventory and crafting system. These systems will be essential to allowing the player to unlock the aforementioned movement abilities, but I felt that it was more necessary to test the movement abilities first before the crafting because I wanted to place an emphasis on it being a movement platformer.

This is the paraglider feature that I implemented.