This fourth week of the project was one of those weeks where I’d like a “do-over.” Due to being sick several days combined doing a poor job of estimating how long things would take, I didn’t complete nearly as much as I planned.
User Stories For This Sprint
#1 Spawn minions at specified points in a dungeon. Completed, but also adds a new user story: be able to create different kinds of minions at the spawn points. This task was estimated at 2 hours and it took 1 hour.
#2 Hook up animations to hero movement. Now when the hero moves left, right, up, or down the correct animation is shown. Since he can only move right now, only idle and walk animations are hooked up. Attacking, dying, etc., will have to be hooked up later. This task was estimated at 2 hours and it took 2 hours.
#3 Create animations for minions and boss.Not as many animations needed since minions and bosses can only move left & right. This task was estimated at 1 hours and it took 1 hour.
#4 Spawn pickup items in dungeon. This is one that wasn’t thought through well enough — pickup items aren’t spawned out of nothing, but they are spawned after a box, barrel, or chest is opened. So spawning those needs to come first. I did add chest spawning as well as the ability for a chest to be opened, but pickup items aren’t in at this time. This task was estimated at 2 hours and it took 3 hours so far.
The other tasks I wanted to complete this week were:
- Finish writing story cards based on current game design document. Finished with 1 hour work.
- Find digital story card software to use in place of index cards. While I looked at a couple options I didn’t spend enough time (yet) to make a decision.
- Update the online game design document. I made notes on the current paper copy but haven’t moved those to the electronic copy. I hope to finish that over the weekend.
I also started reading the book Team Leadership in the Game Industry by Seth Spaulding. I’ll have more to say on that book later.
Thinking Ahead Questions
Things I’m thinking about after this week’s work (and lack of work):
- I’m feeling impending doom for this project due to my inexperience with Scrum. Basically, I need to figure out how to break user stories down into more granular tasks — or, just know that when a story says “A” it might mean that I have to do B, C, and D as well to get it done. Do I need story cards for B, C, and D? Or do I just do those tasks as part of getting A done?
- Played with activating a minion when hero was close. Kind of wondering if the melee combat scheme I’m thinking of will work. Just realizing I don’t think I’ve ever done melee combat before, only ranged.
- Combat might be harder than I expected because the PC and NPCs are bound to the underlying grid system. Which means they can only get close to each other, but not right up on each other. Hopefully the swing of sword and axe will be long enough that it will look like real hits.
Time Spent This Week
Total time working on the above user stories and tasks was 8 hours. There was also another 1 hour of research into agile software and reading, for a total of about 9 hours spent on the project this week.
Total: 9 hours.