I'm Free Sprint 2
Another sprint completed and a decent amount of work got done! We've mostly finished building the foundations of our game. For this sprint, I was assigned 2 cards with a total of 6 points since they were 3 points each. Since I had 2 cards left over from the first sprint that makes the number of cards I have assigned is 4 total. And by the end of this sprint, I finished three cards.
The cards I was assigned have to do with blocking out the rest of the other themed levels which are a military hanger and a forest. Once the player survives the lab and the zoo level they'll get to the hanger and lastly the forest level which is supposed to be highly unlikely.
I first finished the card I was already "in-progress" on since the last sprint which is "As a player, I want to feel like I'm free from the lab I broke out of and now in the open air, however, I'm still fenced in and must keep moving to the right". I originally went for a long forested look with bigger and lengthy-er spaces to emphasize the "free" feeling of breaking out of the cramped lab. I did have trouble making it look like a zoo with just using basic shapes and not knowing what props were going to be made, but once the props and assets for the zoo level are done I can work around that. Regardless, cages and nature-themed assets are going to be central pieces so as long as I have that in mind, the block-out should turn out too different from the actual fleshed-out level.
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| Zoo/Outdoor Level |
Next, I blocked out the military level where "As a player, I want to make it past the zoo and reach the army hangar base that has office buildings, gun lockers, helicopter landing areas, and huge pallets and crates. " This one was pretty fun to block-out, I envisioned that some areas would be partially indoors since the card mentioned office buildings and gun lockers. It should feel more cramped than the zoo and forest levels but not as tightly packed as the lab level.
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| Military Level |
The last block-out left to do is the forest level, "As a player, I want to make it past the military hangar base and into the forest where I can see trees, vegetation, random animals, swamps, vines and boulders as far as the eye can see". This would be the last theme if the player ever survives past the previous three and will be continuous. After all, our game is an infinite runner. Thus I tried to make this level stretched, there's a lot of long pathways and curving/nonlinear trails.
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| Forest Level |
The card I didn't finish this sprint is "As a player, I want to feel like I'm in the middle of a science lab with a bunch of equipment and breakable objects for me to smash and rampage through." I did want to finish all the required block-outs before tackling this card but also we ran into some trouble with the models so I was blocked from doing this card. But Brandon, our excellent modeling who creates all our amazing assets got them done before the sprint ended so I can finish adding assets for the lab level early in Sprint 3 and before the first electronic build. So far, I've got the first room done and it already took a lot of assets especially with the individual railing and pipe pieces you need to piece together like Legos. I hope the player enjoys break it down and seeing all the pieces fly!
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| Lab Starting Room |
The only issues I ran into were the messed-up scaling with the block-outs and finding inspiration for the level block-out. The scaling would jump from 10s and 20s to 0.5s and 1s. This might be because of our grouping in the hierarchy and me accidentally scaling both the "empty" objects that are parent to objects in the scene. I would have to delete most of the scene to fix it so I decided not to. I would be using another scene to build the actual levels anyway so this wouldn't affect the game. Finding inspiration for the block-out is just trying to avoid repetition between levels. Of course, in hindsight, I think I was too worried about this because the block-out was just using cubes and cylinders and not actual props so I was thinking too much into it. Regardless this isn't a problem either since each level actually have different themes and layouts.
Overall, I completed 3 cards and 7 points by the end of Sprint 2. There are no large issues that would complicate us as of now. For Sprint 3, I was assigned 5 more cards which have to do with going back and actually annotating my block-outs so I can use the "level design" as portfolio pieces and an outlier card for lighting. Hopefully, I'll finish all of them by the end of Sprint 3 so I'll have Sprint 4 to focus on adding assets to the other levels. Until then.
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| Block Outs Done! |
