(I started numbering incorrectly at the beginning so this is how I’m fixing that — skipping a log titled week 10. There’s still a log for each week, but a log titled Week 10 doesn’t exist. Yeah, would have been good if I’d fixed this at week 2 or 3…)
This last week I tried an experiment of doing two sprints per week — one from Thursday through the weekend, and the second from Monday to Thursday. My thought was that I’d end up getting more work done but it was a failure. I didn’t stop to think about how I typically split up my time due to other classes/homework, and the work in this class doesn’t fit neatly into two equal-sized sprints. After discussing the issue with Dr. Banks we’ve decided to switch back to a single sprint per week, but to “overload” it with more tasks. That way I don’t have to worry about running out of things to do and “wasting time” until the next sprint starts (main reason for trying two sprints per week).
User stories handled during the two sprints include the following:
- Add drifting text, audio, and particles to combat.
- Only drink health potion if needed, otherwise leave it.
- 75% of the time do LevelNum*10 HP damage on opening a booby-trapped chest.
- Create on-screen looks at all he inventory items.
- Create an AI for the boss NPCs so they can attack the hero.
- Award gold/points to the hero for beating an NPC in combat.
- When letters are spawned, show the correct letter instead of placeholder art.
- Move collected letters from internal inventory to display on screen.
While there are only 4 weeks left in the semester and word-based combat isn’t in yet, the game is at a stage where it’s mostly playable. You can fight orcs and a rock monster, collect things, find keys to open unlocked doors, etc. While I’m not declaring victory just yet, I feel fairly confident I’ll have a finished v1.0 game by the end of the semester.
Last week I was wondering about whether Unity would fix a bug in animation events in time, but I got tired of my guy freezing in combat and so coded around it.
Thinking Ahead Questions
- Wondering about the NPC movement routines. While I haven’t started coding that, I’ve given some thought to how I can fake it out without doing a complete pathfinding system.
- With Unity dropping the web plugin, how can I quickly get builds to beta testers? That kind of has to start happening right away. (Unity Cloud Build?)
- While the purchased stock art is fine for development, for a game to get noticed it should have a distinctive look. Mine doesn’t. Team up with Hunter or someone for art?
Time Spent This Week
Total time working on the user stories was about 11 hours and another 2 hours of misc stuff (class, research, reading) for a total of about 13 hours spent on the project this week.
Weekly Total: 13 hours.
Project Total: 122 hours.