Hello again, I am back to share all the great progress that Guinea Pigs made this sprint! As always I will mention my work in this post along with the problems encountered along the way.
The goal of the sprint was to take player feedback from the playtest and implement it as soon as possible. With that in mind we first focused on polishing the game as much as we could before the playtest, then polishing it as much as we could afterwards. My cards for the whole sprint were focused around additions and polish.
During the sprint I realized that we were not going to have the time to implement all the changes before the next playtest that we wanted. With that in mind I decided to cut some levels and a new ability from the game due to time. I am however excited about the game that we currently have, and I can not wait to release it in the next sprint.
I started the sprint off by explaining how I wanted the time slow ability to work based off of everything that was currently in the game.
Since this was such a major ability, I had to make sure that I explained all the interactions that it had on the game so that we could avoid any potential bugs or side effects. The ability idea is similar to other games that contain a time related ability, those games though completely stop time and everything in the scene. This game makes all moving objects in the scene move at 50% speed which does not give the player a free 5 second button.
After explaining time slow, I went on and worked on a new main menu screen. I originally had this as a title screen image, but I felt it was better for the game if the title screen was 3D since the level select was now 3D. This also solved my fear of creating an art asset for a guinea pig title screen, and this made the menu more interactable which is a win win for me.
The title screen was inspired mostly by the pipe models that were made last sprint. Those models were not used yet in the game and I wanted to place them somewhere, so I made a menu screen around those pipes. I believe it came out pretty good, I wonder what player reactions will be to this screen, I can only wait and see since this was added after the playtest.
After the title screen I made the next big stride towards our games main character being modeled. I modeled the updated guinea pig ball so that playtesters would not have to start at a blue sphere anymore.
Even though the model looks simple, I actually had quite a few problems with this one. The sphere itself was not an issue, but the side panels were. I originally had a version of the model, actually the one inside the sphere is it that only had one side of the hatches modeled. This was a massive problem that I learned when I took it into Unity. The ball is plastic and see through, that means you can see the back faces that do not exist on the hatch which breaks all immersion of the player. I was unsure of how to make a model have double sided faces in Maya, so I made a copy of the hatch and target welded the verts together. I also had to flatten the inside hatch copy so that it would not stick out too far during gameplay. I finally had the problem of having the object reflect the skybox, this would have been fine if we did not have players go down slopes. The skybox reflection was showing even when objects were in front of the skybox. The solution was to lower the metalness of the metallic map.
I then took the hub level from last sprint and I added checkpoints that worked and recorded your position.
This card was just drag, drop flags, and set values. I did not have any issues with this card other than just placing the flags in appropriate spots. I had no idea I was changing the hub level until after I already did the checkpoint card, so I went back and fixed the checkpoint spawns after I updated the hub.
Based off playtester feedback I redesigned the hub to meet player needs. I had no problems with this card, straightforward on the playtester feedback.
I went into every level that players had problems with and adjusted them to fit playtester expectations.
People were able to shortcut from that ramp to the finish gate in Level 3, we moved the gate further away so that this method is no longer possible. People were having issues with the ending platforms in Level 4, so I changed their movement pattern to make it easier for players. People also complained about how Level 5 did not provide a good way to gain momentum in the opening of the level, so I fixed that by adding a straight path left and right. People also thought left side was hard, so I made the gap between checkpoints shorter to add forgiveness for players.
The text boards in the first 3 levels of the game were rushed so that they could make the playtest, I went and updated the text to give more helpful advice, I also changed the plane background to the whiteboard image to give more character to the messages.
This card was also simple and quick to complete, I did not have any problems when fixing the text and images.
This card gave me some problems, I tried to implement a system that spawned the player in the hub based off the level they just left. I am not a great coder, but I gave a solid effort at trying the system. I eventually asked Tristin for some help on how to format the script so it could work properly.
I apologize for the blurry video, this is the respawn system in action after completing a level. The system also works if you leave a level. I had a version of this system where it spawned the player outside the gate like in the gif, but I had the script move the player a certain distance after entering the hub scene. This caused the problem of moving the player when they spawned in the hub from quitting the game, or even launching the hub level for the first time. That is a major problem, so after a lot of trial and error, I had to ask for help.
After adding the spawnpoint functionality I moved on to rerecording all the ghost times for every single level. I was holding off on this card until the 6th level was finish, otherwise I would have to revisit the card. I did not change every single level, but we changed the movement of the player, so the ghosts will be off anyways which is why I went and recorded everything again.
This card did not cause me any problems, the only thing that it did cost me was time since it was hard to set accurate times for every level's medal benchmarks. However, it is done now and I do not believe I will need to set these again unless some level breaking glitch happens, or some massive movement change happens to the player between now and the release of the game.
The final thing I did for this sprint was replace the level images that show up on each level gate with an updated image. I did this because I updated levels based off of the playtesters feedback.
This card is as straightforward as you think, I had no problems replacing the existing images with the new ones.
I said this at the start of the sprint, but we had to cut features due to time. As a group we decided that it was more important to us to make the features we have 100% rather than add another incomplete feature, we also feared that players would not like the new levels if they were added. It is risky to add something this late into the project, so we decided to not risk anything and polish what we have.
Cards that were cut were plans for levels 7, 8, and the timeslow ability entirely. Level 6 was originally for time slow tutorial and levels 7 and 8 were challenge levels using time slow.
I have 2 cards leftover from this sprint, the other 2 cards are for level 8 which is cut. I had a bunch of cards this sprint and I was unable to start working on the leftover 2 cards, here is what they are though.
My first card is to create the Guinea Pig model that will go inside the plastic ball I made this sprint. This is priority number 1 for me, I figured that it is more important that the other gameplay changes made it into the beta playtest rather than the player which we can attach to the ball at anytime. I have reference images for the guinea pig and I will start as soon as I am able to.
My other card is to rework the tutorial text that I have shown to the player in the first 3 levels of the game. Currently we just tell the player how things work with text, but I was thinking of trying to show them in a more interactive way. I am not sure what that way is yet, but I am thinking about it.
Other than the changes above, that is what I was able accomplish this sprint. I am very happy with how the game is looking at the moment, my group is doing great work. I can not wait to publish the game for more people to try it out. The plan for the next sprint is to fix the bugs reported by playtesters, and then add the finish polish to the game.
Sprint 5 Blog
Hello everyone, I am back to update you all on the progress of the Guinea Pigs project. My group members did a bunch of great work too, but in this post I will only mention my work. As always I will talk about each task I did and what problems I encountered along the way.
The goal of this sprint was to make the game have color to it, the aim was to get everything that was going to be in the Alpha playtest and make it have color so that nothing was base unity color. The work that I got done this sprint heavily reflects that, at least in the first half anyways. After that half was when I realized that I need to add more levels into the game for people to play, otherwise this playtest wouldn't be that different from the original one.
I started off the sprint by finally creating the guinea pig themed medals, this was not a hard card for me. This card was just constantly pushed back because other things were more important at the time. I decided that the medals should have something guinea pig related stamped into them.
This is the idea of the medals that I came up with, the original idea was to take a guinea pig image and make it a black and white stamp that I could stamp on each medal. However, that method failed when I noticed that every guinea pig image I found would just turn into a white blob with not enough black lines to define the shape. I eventually found a site that let me use that guinea pig head drawing, it originally had color on it but I took that out and colored it the same as the medal's color.
After creating the medals I decided to create the 4th level that players would play during the playtest later on in the sprint, I did this since players complained about only having 2 levels in the last playtest and I didn't think 3 would be any better.
I actually really liked how this level turned out, but there is 1 massive red flag that you may or may not have noticed. This level looks nothing like the level 4 concept that I have earlier in the blog, my reasoning for the change is because I believed the level was too simple and not very exciting after the new mechanics were added. I had issues in coming up with an idea for this level in the first place, I had to stray away from the simple and short level concept that I was so used too. I ended up with a level that introduced the player to moving platforms which turned out nicely.
After creating level 4 I now started to tackle the color problem of the game, my first target was the slanted floor, and the floor itself. I figured since the skybox in this game has wood in it that I should make the floor a type of wood.
My original plan was to eyedropper the wood color from the skybox, however after actually trying this the wood color was different due to lighting. To solve the issue I just had to eyeball it and see how close I could get, I think I got pretty close to the actual thing.
After getting the floors textured I had to get other objects textured, like the ramp. This one was based on a metal texture, it would only make sense to make the ramps metal when the floor is wood. I didn't want the colors to be too different from each other where something would scream that it doesn't belong.
I didn't want the ramp to be fully metal, so I dulled the metallic map and ended up with something similar to concrete. That isn't a bad thing though, a metallic ramp on a duller wooden floor would have went against everything that I just talked about above.
Next I wanted to texture the finish gate so that it was not gray and it was different from the already established textures. To do this I looked to the already existing skybox, it would not be the smartest idea to start throwing colors into the game that were not in the skybox, otherwise what is the point of the skybox other than setting.
Even though there is not much red in the skybox, it is present and I believe that this tone of red works with the already established wood and concrete. The tone of red gives a more home feeling or at least that is what I'm gathering from it. My only issue with this was finding a proper red color, I eventually narrowed it down to darker shades and not bright reds, this was the outcome.
I then needed to texture the moving platforms in the game, my first thought was to make them metal. This was a good thought, but I gathered after trying a metal texture that the platforms looked too flat.
As you can tell, the platforms are extremely flat, not to mention that they almost look like the base unity gray material. My partners gave me a suggestion to add a border texture to the platforms so that there isn't just one color.
This was the revision, it overall looks better. In order to get this texture though I had to recreate the model because the existing UVs would not allow for an easy texture change like that. After creating that model I was able to easily make an adjustment to the texture and get a black border around the platforms so that they can stand out a bit more.
With that everything was textured for the playtest, the game had color. Now I moved on and created signs in the first three levels that told players the basic controls of the game. This one was a straightforward card and I had no issues setting it up properly.
These signs were just simple instructions, but I hope they help players when playtesting the game so that they do not get super confused on the games controls.
After that I took images of each level and placed them inside of each gate in the hub world so that players could see what the level looked like before entering it.
I took these images so that it was clear to the player what level they were entering before making their choice. As you can imagine this card was simple and therefore I had no issues getting this set up.
The next thing I tackled was with the help of one of my partners we recorded all of the times for the medals on each level that the player had to beat. This was not hard, more tedious than anything considering we had to intentionally play really badly and have it be believable as a medal time of the level.
Ultimately this task was not extremely hard, it just took time to make sure the times felt appropriate compared to the times of the medals. What we had to do was turn on the ghost record feature and race a time on the level, afterwards we had to tell the ghost to play a specific time and we can see if the time looked realistic or not based off the movements. This was a fun card to do and I'm looking forward to doing it in later levels.
The last thing I did for this sprint was creating the google form for players to fill out. I had to make sure to ask the right questions without overstaying my welcome in terms of question number.
I decided that even though a majority of the sprint was towards the artwork and visual, I wanted to mainly question players on their thoughts of the movement and new content added so that I can hammer down their complaints in the following sprint.
That was everything that I finished in Sprint 5, but I had 2 unfinished cards that I want to quickly touch on.
Firstly I have the concept of the time slow ability, I was going to visually show this card, but my group suggested I write it out on the card since it would take less time. To that sentiment I would have to agree, as soon as the sprint starts that is the first thing on my list of priorities.
Second I have the title screen or at least the updated title screen for guinea pigs. I still do not have an idea as to what this title screen will look like, but I will be working on it as soon as I can.
Other than that I was really happy with the work done this sprint by my team, we got a good chunk of the game out of the way and only have some minor tweaks in terms of mechanics left on the table. We have a few more levels to make and I have a guinea pig model to make, that should hopefully be done by the next sprint.
Sprint 4 Blog
Hello again everyone! My name is Matthew Montalvo and I am back to talk about my progress towards the completion of the Guinea Pigs project. I will mention every task I did during Sprint 4 along with the problems that I encountered along the way.
The goal of this sprint was to take the feedback from the playtest last sprint and implement as much of that feedback as possible. The work I got done during this sprint was heavily focused on the player feedback. I got about the same amount of work done as the last sprint, but I felt like all of the work mattered.
I started the sprint off by reworking the ramps in our game to not mess with player movement. Many times in the playtest people would launch themselves off a ramp, but attempt to jump off the very last part of the ramp. That is normal behavior, but the ramps in the game were slightly bumpy and this caused players to launch up right before the top of the ramp. If the player is in the air, they are not allowed to jump.
This was the original ramp model, it is hard to see from this angle but the ramp does not have many faces. The change of elevation with the small amount of faces caused lines to appear on the faces, these lines were causing the surface to become bumpy and were able to launch the player killing momentum.
An obvious fix would be to add edgeloops and then smooth the model. This is how that model turned out, not bad, but you could still see a faint outline of those lines. Despite that I brought this into Unity and tried to test it. I gathered that no matter how hard I tried, when approaching this ramp at full speed I would hit the very first face causing my character to bounce into the air. This did not happen every single time though so it is very inconsistent.
You may notice that the bottom of the ramp is different from the first and second images. I decided to try a stupid solution to the ramp issue, I tried to flip the ramp upside down. To my surprise that actually worked. Now it is extremely rare that the player bounces on the first face of the ramp, flipping the ramp upside down also solved the issue of the player bouncing on the ramp to deny their jump.
This gif is actually 4 different runs where I try jumping as late as possible on the new ramp to see if the player can really jump at the last second. From what I tested you can, however if you still fail at that point it is just because the player did not jump in time making it user error.
After fixing the ramp issue, I went and tried to remake the first level to better fit what some playtesters were saying. We were getting feedback that it is not very fun to compete for leaderboard spots when our current levels were tutorial based and not extremely competitive. With that in mind I decided to create the first 3 levels of the game as a strict tutorial and all levels following those actually being competitive levels where players can compete for times.
This was my first attempt at recreating the level, I decided that it was best to have multiple routes to complete any level, so I added a standard movement route and a ramp based shortcut. I came across the problem though that both routes came out to the same amount of time. I tried adding a middle platform on the ramp shortcut, but I still got very similar times. I even tried to add a second finish gate to make the shortcut faster, but that did not feel good. After asking my group for help, we came up with a solution for this level.
We ultimately decided that it would be better to remove ramps entirely from this level and just focus on player movement and jumping ability. I was too wrapped up on the idea of making a competitive level when in fact this is meant to be a tutorial which would teach the player game mechanics. Having the angled platforms forces the player to jump across to finish the level making them learn both movement and jump.
After level 1 I went and fixed level 2 as well, this time creating the redesign did not take as long as level 1 did. This was because I had the mindset of a tutorial and not a competitive level, this allowed me to be a little more carefree when designing this level.
It is hard to see in this image, but those platforms are not next to each other, they are stacked on top of each other. I created level 2 with the specific purpose of teaching the player about speed boost and ramps. You can finish this level faster if you take the top route and time your speed boosts correctly, but you will still learn about the speed boost and ramp interactions. I overall did not have issues in creating the second level as the interaction between speed boost and ramps was already well established from the previous iterations of level 1 and level 2.
After redesigning the first 2 levels I decided to go and find a skybox for the game. My goal in looking for a skybox was to find something that looked like a lab. Looking through google did not find any results. After that I tried looking for a science classroom one since that would be similar enough to what I was going for. I did not find that one either, so I went and searched the HDRI Haven website for those same skyboxes. I also did not find them there, so I widened my horizon to include any kind of lab, and I finally found a contender.
This skybox sort of captures the feel that I wanted in this game, the color scheme invokes a calming feeling while also drowning out the grayness of the Unity skybox.
I realized that no matter how many tasks I give out during sprints, I will always need to make more. I tried adding more tasks for the group to work on, but I realized that I still need more to ensure we finish the semester in great shape. I am currently struggling to figure out what to create for tasks, however after trail and error I am getting somewhere with the tasks.
After I fixed level 1 and 2 I went on to finally create the third level of the game. All 3 of these levels were designed with the intent of them being a tutorial while all future levels would be focused on competitive gameplay.
The third level is focusing solely on the double jump and how you can use it in a variety of situations. In this case, double jump versus a large gap, jumps you can't make even after taking a ramp, and height differences. This level was not very challenging to create, and I believe it gets the point across for usefulness of the double jump ability.
The final thing I did for this sprint was creating the updated medal times for the 3 levels in this game so far. I made the times whole numbers because decimal times are inconsistent most of the time.
There wasn't anything hard about this card, I just had to play these levels over and over again to gain a proper idea on what medal times would be appropriate.
This sprint was especially rough on the amount of cards I was unable to finish. I wanted the focus of the sprint to be on addressing playtester concerns. For me to do that I had to push all of my current cards to the lowest priority while keeping the playtesting results cards on higher priority.
I pushed back the guinea pig medals and the guinea pig title screen again since I believed them to be lower priority compared to the other cards I was working on. Those cards specifically are going to get finished by Sprint 5 since I am making that sprint about art cards and level cards.
I also pushed back the level 4 blockout and a concept image of what the time slow ability would look like and function like. These were pushed back for the same reason as the other two, I just felt that there were higher priority cards that needed to be done. These cards should also be completed by the end of Sprint 5.
Overall I believe that this sprint was a strong push towards a game that our players want. Listening to playtesting feedback is vital and I felt that it was priority number 1 over all other cards. I felt that the work I got done was a great stepping stone, and if my group and I continue on this pace, then we will finish every card I have in the backlog before the end of Sprint 7. I lightly touched this above, but Sprint 5's focus will be on creating the art of the game, the gameplay is there, but the art is missing so we need to nail that down.
Sprint 3 Blog
Hello everyone! My name is Matthew Montalvo, and I am back to talk about my progress towards the Guinea Pigs project. I will share every task that I completed during Sprint 3, and I am going to talk about the problems I encountered.
The goal of this sprint was to get a working prototype of the games idea, playability from start to end of the current work that my team has accomplished. In terms of work that I got done this sprint, it was less in the cards department and more in the points department compared to the last sprint.
I started this sprint off strong with an essential floor piece that would be used in many levels. I created a slanted floor piece that could be used as a sloped surface that the player travels up.
This piece was simple to model, but I faced a challenge of making sure the slope was natural feeling and not just flat. I wanted the slope to be gradual instead of instant, in order to accomplish this I tried lowering one sides vertices to about halfway. However, this did not solve the problem, the slope had to be placed into the ground in order for the player to have a smooth transition from flat ground to slanted surface.
The model in the picture above is the final solution that I came up with to solve the issue, the slope would be flat on one side so that it could be snapped to the top vertices of other floors so there is a smooth transition. After testing this slope closer to the playtest, I found an issue where players could clip through the flat part of the slope. This issue will be fixed with a model revision in the next sprint.
Tristin and I met up and we decided that we needed a clear menu order system written down so that we could reference this for the rest of the project.
Apologizes, this image does not show the entire menu structure, but it does show the general flow. I am currently updating this menu sequence when I think of art ideas or better ways to visualize the typical players experience in the game.
I then noticed that we were missing a clear finish spot, a model where the player would understand that they needed to finish there. I got to work and created a model, I ended up with this kind of a design.
However, I had a problem with this design, it was way too wide and it was hard to grasp what the object was. I implemented a version where the model became thinner and not as smooth, the image below is that model.
I figured that a more blocky look would look more realistic for a gate representing a finish line, my team seemed to agree with me. Overall the model was not very hard to make, but I was in the same spot as the slanted slope where I had to just mess around a bit with the model to get a general look and feel that I wanted.
Now that I had my models, I went ahead and created the first level of the game. The level was pretty simple with just a few ramp jumps, but the idea of the level was to teach the player the basic movement of the game.
Even though this level looks simple, it is deceptive since it has plenty of time to be saved. I had one major problem when designing this level, I had to make a major choice in terms of my level design. Should I, or should I not use walls? I tried to use walls at the start, but the level felt like it was restrictive towards the player and the walls also prevented potential shortcuts. In the end I decided that it made sense to remove walls from levels, but that will not stop me from using some walls in levels to solve potential issues during gameplay. Here is a playthrough of level 1, this does not have the most updated UI, but the level is still accurate.
I am always playtesting these levels to see if anything needs to be changed, and I will not hesitate to go back and redo or fix issues in earlier levels. However, I am eagerly awaiting playtest results to see other peoples reactions to this level so that I know what needs to be changed.
After feeling confident and finishing level 1, I went on and tackled level 2. I started off this level with testing speed boost in an actual level environment, we have only messed with it in a test environment. I noticed right away that the speed boost felt strong, so instead of messing around the with speed boost itself, I decided it was a smart idea to design the level around the strong speed boost.
I ended up playtesting this level so much that I was blinded by how strong the speed boost was, I'm obviously going to be better at the game than my playtesters. This was a massive oversight on my end, and I'm pretty sure the playtest results are going to show this. I will make sure to make any corrections to the level design after the playtest to accommodate the playtesters feedback.
After finishing level 2, I went and started designing level 4 since Ragalla was designing level 3.
My goal when designing level 4 was to create a short track that can be shortcut intentionally for a huge time save. My major problem with this level though was when I first designed it, I made the level too simple. I had a version where the finish was where the second ramp is, so the shortcut was to just go diagonal from the first ramp to the finish. I thought this level was too simple, so I decided to move the finish to where it is in the photo and have the shortcut be to go diagonal off the ramp to the left for an early finish.
I will go over this card quickly since I don't really count this as work, but I created a google form for the first electronic playtest.
I decided that the goal of this playtest is to gauge how good our movement, and levels were. After the playtest we are going to review the data and then prioritize fixing the stuff that playtesters didn't like before any of our current tasks. I would rather fix the stuff we currently have then to continue working on new stuff, that is why I am going to postpone our current tasks as soon as the playtest data is all done.
The final card that I got done for the sprint is the creation of a 4th medal called the Dev medal, if you achieve one of these, that means that you got an extremely good time on that level.
These are the current placeholder medals that players can earn, there are future plans to make these medals guinea pig themed, but I have prioritized other cards first. Here is the final version of the Dev medal that players can earn.
I had the problem when designing this medal of not making something generic. What medal is always considered better than Gold? Most games do platinum, some games do diamond, how many games do red medals? So for Guinea Pigs the best medal you can get is red and I believe that is pretty sick.
In terms of the tasks that I never got to complete for Sprint 3, let me talk about each one.
Guinea Pig themed medals, I kept putting this card off since I was more focused on getting a working prototype out to playtesters than a version with Guinea Pig themed medals. I am still working on designs for these medals, this might get done in Sprint 4, but I'm prioritizing playtest feedback cards above all else so we will see what happens.
I want a guinea pig themed title screen, I didn't get to his card, but we already had a temporary image on the title screen so I felt that this card was not a high priority. That is my reason for pushing this particular card back.
The actual making of level 3 in Unity, I was actually never able to do this card in Sprint 3. I was actually blocked, but I never made it to the card so the block did not mean much. Ragalla never finished the level 3 concept in sprint 3, I had him prioritize more important cards instead since we were only playtesting 2 levels in this version.
Overall I believe that my team and I had a much stronger Sprint 3 than Sprint 2, we were able to get a good chunk of work done. The game also came out pretty good, I'm excited to see how the playtest results come out. The plan for Sprint 4 at the moment is to prioritize playtesting feedback and address the problems in our game, then we will continue to work on new levels and artwork.
Sprint 2 Blog
Hello everyone! My name is Matthew Montalvo and I am back again to report my progress in the Guinea Pigs project. I will be sharing everything I did over the last Sprint, along with problems that arose and how I solved them. Without anymore delay, I will talk about everything I did.
At the very start of the Sprint I came up with some simple drawings that would show off the standard modular pieces that we would need to quickly make levels.
These drawings were based on reference, specifically the concept of the wooden building blocks that kids used to play with.
The card I gave myself is as follows "As a player, I want mock-up drawings of a simplistic modular ramp, ground, and turn pieces that will be used in level, I want to feel like I can trust these objects sturdiness." From left to right, the objects are a Ramp, Floor, Wall, and Corner pieces. Looking back on this card, and I should have thrown more effort into this. The problem I ran into with this card was not making the drawings look flat. I tried drawing them in a 3-D perspective, but I ultimately decided to that these fit the bill at the time and moved on to other cards.
On the same day, I created a temporary player character for my programmer so that he could see if the player is rolling, and how fast.
The card I gave myself is as follows "As a designer, I want a sphere that has 2 different sections, so that I may easily see the players movement." This was not a very hard task just based on how simple the model is, I tried making the geometry perfect though. I made a version before this where the sphere had 3 different colors, but I got the impression that the sphere was splattered with paint and was too much to look at. What I did was I made the middle a neutral gray, while I made the top and bottom the same color so that it was easier to look at.
Six days later I got my next card completed, I created tasks for my team and I to do for the next 4-6 weeks.
The card I gave myself is as follows "As a player, I want a backlog created that shows all tasks that I can think of needed for the next half of the semester, so that I can feel like I can organize my teams sprints for the next half of the semester." I originally planned to have tasks sorted for the rest of the semester, however I was running out of tasks to write out as cards. My plan is to revisit the backlog later into the semester so that I can write out more relevant cards to the end of the project than what I can currently predict.
One day later I finished my next card, it was to create a modular wall that can be used to create levels with.
The card I gave myself is as follows "As a player, I want a standard wall modeled that I can use during levels to show boundaries, so that I feel like I can make levels efficiently." The main problem that I came across during this card was how to make the wall not appear flat. I wanted to avoid a flat wall at all costs since that would look very boring while moving past. I ended up solving this issue pretty quickly by making the wall rounded, while also having a picture framed inward extrusion. I believe the wall came out pretty good overall, but I may need to revisit it in the future to add variations so that it's not the same wall repeated over and over again.
The final card that I worked on this Sprint was a model for a ramp, I wanted this model to be appealing to launch your character off of.
The card I gave myself is as follows "As a player, I want a standard ramp modeled that I can use during levels to indicate player jumps, so that I can feel like I can make riskier levels." The main problem that I had was getting the rounded shape. I tried a few times, and then finally thought of the correct way to get the shape I wanted. To avoid the ramp feeling flat, I added some sides to the overall shape of the ramp so that the player can clearly see the area that they can use. I think there may have been a Maya issue, because when I was finalizing the model, I had this black shading on the model that wouldn't go away. I gave the model to Tristin and it worked just fine in his Maya, so he gave it back to me and the problem fixed itself.
Just like last Sprint, I have a few cards that were leftover and I will be tackling in the next Sprint.
The first card I wasn't able to complete was to design a model for the floor that will be used in each level.
I have a reference ready for the floor, I just have not been able to tackle it yet. My plan is to make something similar to this, but I am trying to avoid making the floor feel too flat. I will need to see how this turns out in the next Sprint.
The other card I haven't completed yet is a blockout of level 1 in Unity so that my team can start testing mechanics together to get the overall feel of the game.
The idea of this card is to make the blockout off of the concept that I did in Sprint 1. I have been avoiding this card though since I wanted to make all the models first. Thinking about this card more though now, I should have gotten something in way sooner so that I would only need to replace models and my team could still get testing in. That is my fault and I am planning to fix it in the next Sprint as soon as I can.
Other than those 2 cards, I believe that I did a pretty good job this Sprint. Once I get these models done and I get to start making the levels, I believe that the amount of work I can get done should increase. I'm hoping that with this lighter sprint over with, that my team and I can start cranking out more work on a consistent basis. Thanks for reading and I'll be ready to report my progress in the next Sprint Blog post.
Sprint 1 Blog
Hello everyone! My name is Matthew Montalvo and I am the producer of my first ever game project called Guinea Pigs. Guinea Pigs is an arcade platformer where you must use momentum and powerups to quickly speedrun levels. Today I want to share what I did over the last Sprint and the problems that I encountered, and finally how I solved these issues. Without further delay, I will jump into all the cards I did.
Almost halfway into Sprint 1 and I thought of an idea for the first level of the game. I ultimately ended up with this concept sketch for level 1.
The card that I gave myself for this task was worded as follows "As a Designer I want a level mock-up for level 1 that revolves around movement." I was tasked with making a movement focused level where the player had no movement enhancing abilities, it was an interesting task. My original thought when tackling this level was to make it faster paced because the game revolves around speed running, but after some thought I realized that a slower route was needed. In the original design in my head when I pitched it to my team, I had pitfalls added which was not a good idea for a first level. I removed those entirely and instead opted for angled ground that let you go back around to try the ramp jumps again. Overall this level went off momentum and the players ability to move the ball to cross smaller gaps.
After a couple of days I came back and got a level select screen, I had to fix a small issue in this card, but it was a quick fix.
The task was worded as follows "As a player, I want a level select screen that is nice and clean to look at." I was tasked with making a level select screen that the player would look at when they hit play. I wanted this screen to be simple, yet dynamic in the sense that a fair amount of info is displayed in an easy to read format. The only change from the original design to this design is that my group members pointed out that using the same arrow for the top left would confuse people. I thought about it and I agreed so I went and drew a different kind of arrow that still signals a back action from the player.
On the same day I also got a design out for what the game's 2nd level would look like, I had no issues with this card and got it out relatively quickly.
The task was worded as follows "As a designer, I want a level mock-up for level 2 that revolves around the speed boost." I had to design a level built around the speed boost powerup that the player unlocks after level 1. I wanted the steep slopes in the level to still be climbable without speed boost, but I wanted it to be way slower, this is a speed running game after all. Speed boost is a short burst of speed that will allow your character to carry their momentum over jumps and slanted surfaces. Overall this level was easier to design compared to the 1st level.
I realized that one of my group members specialties was not drawing and I gave him a drawing task, after figuring this out I changed from my initial plan of drawing a level with the UI and player in it. I realized it would be too hard of a task for my group member, so I decided to create a Demo level that would be used in this playtest rather than the other two levels.
The task was worded as follows "As a player, I want a demo level mock-up that shows off all aspects of the game, so that I can feel like I understand how the game functions." I was in a meeting with my group and I was told that we should make a level that has everything so that players get a better understanding of the games mechanics. It made sense, so I took level 1 and modified it since the level structure was better than level 2 to house a level with everything in it. I struggled to figure out a way to incorporate the jump powerup in a meaningful way so that the player would understand it's use. My first thought was to have distanced platforms that the player needed to jump too, but I figured it would be a weird approach. I instead tried to have elevated platforms that the player jumped on to progress, looking back on this design I realize that the jump powerup section slows the player in a speed running game. That was a bad mistake, and I'm going to try avoiding that in the future.
Since we still needed to solve the issue of drawing the level for the playtest, I figured I would create a blockout in Unity so that we can just screenshot rather than draw them out.
For context, the player starts on the right of this image. The task was worded as follows "As a player, I want a demo level blockout in Unity, so that I can feel like I understand the 3D level layout." This card was pretty straight forward and I just placed a bunch of unity assets together and created this blockout. I had to get this card done fast so that my partner's card for screenshotting the level wasn't blocked for longer than it needed to be.
A day before the playtest I created the rules for my teams playtest, we were not like other groups where we had a physical prototype, we would get almost no good user feedback if we tried to do a type of movement based gameplay on a paper prototype. We solved this issue by having a complete walkthrough of what a typical level sequence is done, title screen all the way to leaderboard screen of a level.
The task was worded as follows "As a player, I want a set of instruction on how to "play" the paper prototype so that I can feel confident in the way I "play" the game." I put "" around play since this playtest is pretty much the user observing how the game works without actually playing anything themselves. The instructions were easy to write since the player only needed to know what they were doing for this playtest and not the main game.
The day before playtesting started, I got help from Tristin, but we created the google survey that players would take after viewing our playtest.
The task was as follows "As a player, I want a survey to record the thoughts of our playtesters, so that I can feel like I'm gathering valuable feedback." We were able to come up with UI questions pretty easily since that was what the playtest was around, but we had issues creating questions for the gameplay side since it was screenshots and not video (my fault). We eventually came up with questions around the momentum side of the movement and asked for users opinions on it. We also asked users about how the UI size is and what should be adjusted there.
Of my tasks in Sprint 1 I had 2 cards that I was unable to complete. One card was for creating mock-up drawings of a modular ramp, ground, and turn/corner pieces that we could use over and over again in levels. I was using this for reference, but I have not found a good way to draw them yet in a different way.
My drawings are going to be something similar to this since I believe the wooden blocks to be a cool aesthetic for the game.
The other card is to create a sphere that is in 2 sections so that we may color it separate colors so we may easily tell player movement and rotation. This card is really easy and I should have done it by now, but I kept putting more important cards in front of it. I don't have a good reason as to why this card is not done yet.
The sphere would look something like this, except I would take away the middle circle and stick with the 2 half circles with a line connecting the two.
Other than those minor hiccups on cards, I would say that this Sprint was fairly productive for me, I got some future level designs ready along with some concept menus. I know that my team did a great job and we are already full steam ahead into the next Sprint where we are focusing on the models and core systems and powerups for the player. I'm looking forward to reporting what I have in the next Sprint Blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment