I'm Free Sprint 3
Sprint 3 just finished and we're a third-way done with production and just built our first electronic prototype. For this sprint, I was assigned 7 cards with 1 card carried over from the previous sprint with a total of 10 points. I completed 5 of those cards, marking my total points completed as 8 points.
The cards I was assigned were adding lighting to the level, doing annotated maps for my blockouts, and when I completed those cards I was also assigned a few particle-effect cards for me to work on as I waited for the assets for the upcoming levels to be done.
Since our electronic prototype is coming up, I planned to finish the card that was carried over from the previous sprints about adding assets and actually fleshing out our levels, "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." Adding the assets was, needless to say, pretty busy work. The assets were wonderfully made and easily pieced together. It was just my job to make sure they come together to complete a picture, like solving a jigsaw puzzle. I tried to make each room different and followed most of the layouts I did in the blockouts. Of course, scaling and props did not match the basic geometric shapes I used in the blockouts so there are parts where I took creative-license. I also tried to avoid art fatigue as well where players will feel tired of looking at a level due to the repetition of props and layout.
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| Lab Level Done |
When I was partly done with adding assets, we encountered a problem. Which was generating the levels and making each room an individual piece, a prefab. I was following my block out so everything was laid out in a long hallway sort of fashion which wouldn't work with the code. Instead we needed a special template to add rooms in so they can be spawned in and snapped together with "spawn points". I went back and incorporated this in every room so they followed the same template with each room starting at (0,0,0) instead of a long hallway.
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| Room Template: Two Spawn Points (Room Start and Room End) |
I had been working on the lighting card at the same time when I was fleshing out the level with assets. After some feedback, I went back and decreased the brightness a bit and played around with gray colors in my three-point lights, then sent the card to "To Verify".
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| Lighting |
When that card was done and room prefabs were given to the programmer to work on room spawn, I decided on working on the annotation cards next. I did each annotation in order from Lab, Zoo, Military Base, and Forest. I referenced back and forth to the blockouts in Unity to the annotations I made in draw.io. Of course there were some problems with the scaling since it wasn't perfect or exact to the ones in Unity (not to mention the previous problem with Unity and the scaling issue in there).
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| Annotated Maps |
Regardless the annotations and the blockouts were pretty similar save for the actual enemy placements show in the annotations. During this I realized the levels might need to be more open to have room for enemies to "fit" in the level. This will be further thought about when the scales of the enemies and how they move is fleshed out by our modeler and programmer.
With no cards left, I asked for more cards and was assigned to do two particle effects, electric sparks and blood splatters. My work on particle effects is very basic but I'm excited to tackle them. However, I did not really have time to work on them before the sprint ended. The cards I was assigned for Sprint 4 were cards for lighting in each level, adding assets for the Zoo level, and redoing blockouts in the style of the room template. I decided to hold off on the particle effects for now (Art < Mechanics) since our programmer requested that I should go back and tweak the blockouts so they all follow the room template (rooms at (0,0,0) and not a long hallway). This card felt to me like a higher priority since this is needed to test the room spawning mechanic, a core feature in the game. Thus that is the card I'm currently working on as Sprint 4 begins. I hope to be able to finish all my cards in Sprint 4. Until then.
