CAGD 370 Blog Post 4

  

CAGD 370

Video Game Production

The Crescendo - Blog Post 4

Alex Peters (Team Lead), Kade Chambers (Programmer), Anthoney Johnston (Level Designer)

    My name is Kade Chambers, and I am the programmer for our game prototype development team. For the fourth sprint of the game prototype "The Crescendo," I finished implementing all of our core mechanics and systems. This includes the final changes to our player movement capabilities, as well as the entirety the of player menu user interface. I was responsible for all scripting tasks and setting the UI in the Unity environment. This allows our player to move through our game levels, quit to menu, and shut down the game.

    

    For sprint 4, I had 8 points total assigned to me through Trello during our sprint kickoff. Duirng this meeting, we negotiated the amount of work that we would be able to complete. We learned from previous sprints that our cards were encompassing too much the work being completed, so we attempted to break these tasks down to be more descriptive of work being done. Out of these 8 points assigned, I completed 5 points before our game prototype playtest. The tasks associated with these points were deemed most essential to gameplay and player feedback, and were a priority for both myself and my team members. I also completed a large task that is not represented in our cards. This is the player ability to pause the game at any time within a level, stopping all movement, as well as pausing our audio controller to sync with the players position on the map. This task was not thought of during our kickoff, however, it was essential for the player to have before the playtest.

    

    During the first week of our sprint, I worked on implementing a player slow-down feature during gameplay. This was to allow the player to quickly change pace in the middle of the level in order to avoid enemies or to pursue speed boosts. The difficulty in this implementation was how our audio component script is set up. Since the players speed multiplier directly influences the audio of the levels song, this change in speed need to properly preserve both modifiers of the regular player speed, as well as the slowed-down multipler, and not mess with the level design being synced with audio. By modifying our audio script to better interact with the data from our player, I was able to get this change done seamlessy during gameplay.

The second week of sprint 4, I was having difficulty getting certain UI elements to work with our EventSystem component within Unity. This ended up having an easy solution, however, it took longer to resolve than I would have liked for the sprint. Since this was essential to continuing with implementing any other UI components to control scene selection, I was stuck before I could move on to another task briefly. While I was stuck with this part of the Unity environment set-up, I finished getting my list of scripts ready to be tied to the canvas and the button events. Showing each of these scripts would be repetitive, so below is a list of my scripts designed for modular, individual buttons:

    Among these scripts is our PauseMenu functionality, which I was able to implement and tie it to a canvas element in order for the player to have a pause menu when hitting ESC on their keyboard. This allows our player to leave their current level if they would like to select a new one, or to resume gameplay on the current level.

    Overall, I feel that the work completed by me during this sprint is more than satisfactory. I could have completed more points on the Trello card list if we had listed the important pausing feature. This took a bit of time to complete, and does not properly reflect the amount of work completed by me during this sprint as it did not contribute to my point total, but took away from my available time to complete tasks that were assigned on Trello. My tasks also covered a lot of work per point assigned. This was a good learning experience for my team, as we work to improve our ability to look ahead and anticipate needed player mechanics for smooth gameplay.