Sprint 7: Super Charged
To give you an idea of where the prototype is, below is some gameplay footage of our latest build. The game isn’t where we want it to be at this point (as it often goes in game development), but we are still happy with what we have. We have taken a couple of steps forward during our transition from 2D placeholders to 3D models, but we have lost a lot of the feel and feedback of the last week’s prototype.
Additionally, we don’t yet have our 3D environment working. We encountered a surprising amount of complexity trying to get the camera to function the way we want it too while still properly representing our art. We have already had several meetings with Champlain College faculty members trying to figure out the issue. We have a couple of different routes we can take and each of them have their sets of pros and cons. This camera problem has become such the demanding issue on all sides that we are dedicating this next sprint to figure out how to get the camera to work the way we want it to. Anyways, here is some gameplay footage:
Shifting gears- lets talk team dynamic. Right now everyone on the team is super pumped about Lucha Megadrive. At the start of this week we took some time in one of our meetings to acknowledge each other and to let our positive thoughts to be known. I brought written notes about what I wanted to say to each of my team members. We each took turns sitting in the hot seat and receiving heartfelt compliments. This was a huge success and a much needed morale boost.
Why was it needed? Right at the end of last sprint we hit the road block mentioned above with our dynamic camera and it caused a few other tasks to come in late or get pushed back. Everyone on the team has a tendency to blame themselves when something goes wrong. All of us definitely took our turn last week blaming ourselves for not thinking about this sooner or not creating documents detailing how the camera was supposed to work. This problem escalated on the last day of our sprint and really crushed everyone’s spirits. Suffice to say, we weren’t too confident challenging the next day with only half of what we wanted to have completed. But the next morning at 8:00am we presented anyways and we made it through which lifted our spirits, but we weren’t back to normal! Later that day we did our acknowledge circle and our spirits did a complete 180 from 24 hours before. Everyone is back to being happy and stable and now we are focusing this week on nailing this camera issue.
I love working with this team and I’m super confident we can figure this issue out. If anything, this road block brought us together more. For most of this semester we have been on good terms with each other, but that unifying feeling wasn’t quite 100% yet. Now, it feels like we have crossed a threshold and we are super charged and ready to activate our megadrive attacks!