Sprint 3 Kickoff

Soar Kickoff 3 

Sprint review three starts off with me the producer assigning work for the team so we can go in knowing what to do. This sprint we needed to have a build for the class to playtest so we can get feedback and solve the problems that come. The first thing that I tackled was the enemy models, even though we didn’t need art the lead designer felt like the game needed color and character builds. The game has three enemies: the sitting still, the follower,  and a forward enemy. I took the role of taking on the sitting still enemy and the forward enemy and then passed the models to the lead designer to texture them.

I followed the guide of what the characters are supposed to be referenced from as best as my ability. Both characters took me around an hour and a half to create, UV, and color Id. I made the weapon for the main character, it being a spear that they will have all game. At first it was going to be a sword from the first sprint, but later was changed for it being for the enemies. The spear was a quick process and the uv took less than 2 minutes just a basic weapon for our character. 

Going back to the build for the class we had thought that the game would be at least playable and functional. When the playtests were under roll that’s when the problems started to bleed out. Since we had mechanics of tapping WASD for the movement, and also if the player tapped W then hit S they would stop and hover. The team and I saw this as a problem because of players tapping the keys and nothing was happening due to the countering the keys with each other. Some players were able to figure out what was going on after we had to inform them on how the movement works. A function we had was for when a player is tapping the W key multiple times they will start going a faster velocity of speed, and we noticed that it was too quick so after we tuned it down to solve that problem. Us thinking the game was going to have minor issues turned into major ones because it included our movement for the character, the most important mechanic. Some players didn’t know what a UI bar was on the top right getting higher and higher as the player traveled throughout the level and it was the distance bar but we didn’t have anything to label it and also for stormlight: players didn’t really pay attention to the meter.

So  what me and my team decided to do was finish this sprint with the assigned backlogs to have nothing added to pile up even more. We also discussed that we are going to take all the comments about our game and review each problem. The sprint coming up we are going to rework the movement and also tune down speed. We are also going to have a rework on the collider for the player, which leads to an issue during playtests that players will phase through the walls. The goal is to fix this so when we playtest again we would like to hear most of the comments made in the first time not to be mentioned again. This is the main focus but we are assigning more tasks that aren’t going to receive more time from the 2 weeks we have in the sprint. We will  attempt the tasks and have enough time to make sure it can be completed or not to ask the group for help or we decide for it to be cut.