Sprint 5: Deep Dive Week 1
This past sprint Team Nitro Fist had our first week of deep dive. We plan to be working on this mini vertical slice for the next 2 weeks. During our in class demo we showed off our rig for our first 3D character, the final core fighting game mechanics, basic meter implementation, and made progress on our documentation.
Basic meter functionality is in. When a player hits or gets hit they receive a certain amount of meter bar.
High flying attacks are still in and fun to pull off.
Big addition this week is the grabs/throwing attacks. Initially this caused us some programming issues. Should we have a buffer for player input? How do players defend against grabs? We consulted some of the programming faculty this week and they helped us to the idea of playing a single animation for each grab combination. This solution solves the problem for the programmers, but puts a bit more work on our artists.
We continue to receive great feedback from both the faculty and our fellow students. They help us iterate on our game and make sure that we aren’t making something that only we would want to play. Here are some of the QA testing results we have received so far:
We are getting a variety of skilled players, some who like fighting games, some who don’t like wrestling.
Our top rope mechanics seem to be iterating in the right direction.
Our plan moving forward is to really flesh out the feel of our game by adding some basic sounds, gameplay feedback, and transitioning from 2D sprites to 3D models. We don’t have class this next week, so we put together a rough plan for the next two weeks and mapped our when we want to challenge the next stages.
These are just our stories for each week. We keep our tasks in a separate spreadsheet. There isn’t much time left before the presentation in November. We want to try and get to the vertical slice stage as soon as possible, so that when we present we have a game the feels good, looks good, and is well thought out and planned. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but our team is still motivated and I am proud of what we have accomplished so far.