Blog Post 4

I am the producer of Group 5, called We Are Gibby. The game we are making is called Gibby’s Escape. This sprint, we were able to continue our momentum from the previous sprint and completed 11 cards, putting us slightly behind schedule rather than vastly behind schedule due to our earlier sprints not being as productive. 

I think that as a producer, I have been able to complete my job to a strong capacity, and I understand much more about the role than I previously did. Our sprint kickoff was efficient, and I understood exactly how many cards I needed to aim to assign to my group mates in order to get the most out of them. I was able to gauge this by utilizing the burndown chart that we were taught to create in class. I took our velocity of the previous three sprints, which was 8.3, and compared that against our previous sprint’s point completion, which was 11, and aimed for the sweet spot in the middle. Ultimately, we were able to match the previous sprint and complete 11 cards in this sprint as well. 

In terms of the development cycle, I believe that it was somewhat successful. I was able to completely implement a working inventory, and was able to implement a very rudimentary version of the crafting system which I plan on expanding on in this final sprint. The inventory system was very extensive and took me a vast amount of time, but it was the main final feature that needed to be implemented. We already had movement abilities in place, and we simply needed to link that up to the scriptable object items that we created so that they could be accessed within the inventory.

In the inventory system, the main thing that took up the majority of the time was trying to understand how I would be able to get the collision system to talk to the player’s inventory. What I mean by that is that in order to pick up items, the player must walk to the item in the game and make contact with it in order for it to be picked up. I struggled with this for a bit, before finding my solution: I would add a script onto the items that would contain a scriptable object corresponding to the item, which would then be added to the inventory based on what scriptable object was attached to the item. 

Another thing that took a long time for me to complete with the inventory system was figuring out how I would have the items work when they are in the player’s hot bar. At the moment, the solution I have works, but is not that modular and versatile. If the player holds a select few items in their hot bar, specifically the Grappling Gun and the Paraglider, then the player will be able to use those items as a bool that allows access to the item features has been set to true. This solution is definitely temporary–I simply wanted to make sure that I could emulate the feel of the final prototype in time for the systems playtest. The features worked as intended, but I think that ultimately, I would prefer to have a function be called that changes its references based on what item is in the player’s hand.

The work that I was unable to complete is related to the inventory and crafting system. Fortunately, that work is mainly polish and can be completed much faster than the previous work due to the foundation being laid. I just need to implement a visual crafting system, as well as make sure that all of the items will display for the player in their “hand” when they have them selected in their hot bar.

I think that overall, my group struggled and still struggles with time management. Though we were able to increase our pace and reach a reasonable standard of work per sprint, I feel like our group had more potential to finish even more work and implement more features to make our game stand out. Unfortunately, there were different levels of effort coming from each member that I had to consider when it came to assigning cards.