Back to a single sprint this week and just three user stories:
- Import word code from Endless Speller game and hook it up.
- If hero is up against an enemy, he needs to do automatic melee attacks.
- QA this sprint.
Number 2 in the list was finished, although it resulted in a big chunk of the hero movement code being rewritten. Auto-melee was always planned for the hero — I went with a manual attack while testing the animations and then just left it in. Bah!
Number 1 on the list took more than twice the number of hours allotted and still didn’t get done. It kind of tricked me — the first part went very fast and I was patting myself on the back just a few hours in. That then changed to scratching my head and trying to figure out all the edge cases that weren’t in the original game this code came from.
That user story went into the backlog and then back into the sprint for this week — I wanted to continue on it instead of switching gears and working on other pieces.
Thinking Ahead Questions
- Biggest question is whether I’ll finish the game by December 3rd or not. By cutting some of the original features I should be able to make it, but I’m hoping I don’t have to cut too deeply.
- How do I populate each dungeon with the right number of monsters vs pickup items? From testing I can see it will be *very* easy to make a level too easy or too hard. Tuning is the key for a game like this.
- Need to put together some kind of download page online so people can grab the final project to play (maybe just go with Win/Mac/Linux downloads and leave mobile for a later version).
Time Spent This Week
Total time working on the user stories was about 17.5 hours and another 2.5 hours of misc stuff (class, research, reading) for a total of just under 20 hours spent on the project this week.
Weekly Total: 20 hours.
Project Total: 142 hours.