CAGD 377 - Mobile Game Development

       I am the lead designer of group 2, and we are the team that is making Dimensional Delivery. I learned a lot of important things about our game over the course of this sprint, and they will have a direct impact on how we, or at least I, will spend the last sprint of this project trying to refine our game. During the sprint, I mainly worked on finishing the remaining list of sprites which I had been given in the previous sprint, and moving on to creating level difficulty variants for every level that we had currently implemented into the game. There were a few random issues that popped up from doing this. One thing that evaded me for a decent amount of time was that even though I had not created many of the assets myself and had used prefabs to put them into my level, some levels did not have any of the assets as prefabs and were not updating accordingly as a result. I manually fixed each of these levels, but it was not until the end of the sprint that I recog...

 I am the lead designer of Group 5. Over the course of this sprint, we shifted the focus from polishing the portal mechanics and level design to trying to clean up the overall presentation of the game. For me specifically, I shifted my focus from trying to create new levels and iterating on them to making sure that the user experience was visually appealing. The first thing I did at the very beginning of the sprint was change the app icon so that the appearance of the portal underneath the package was square. We changed the shape of the portal from an oval to a square for a handful of reasons. The first one is the most obvious–the way our portal appeared was much too similar to that of how the portals in Portal presented themselves. We wanted to find an easy way to differentiate our game from it other than just changing the colors of the portals. Another reason why we changed the shape of the portals was for the visual satisfaction aspect. It was an unexpectedly pleasant surprise t...

 I am the lead designer of the newly renamed Dimensional Delivery. Over the course of Sprint 4, the development of the game has progressed very well, with some minor hiccups along the way. Throughout this sprint, the primary roadblock that our group faced was that we encountered a lull in progress because we were preoccupied with needing to complete a project from CAGD 373. However, in spite of that, we still managed to make great progress as far as building and polishing the pre-existing features of the game went. One of the primary tasks that I focused on across the course of this sprint was level design. At the start of the sprint, I designed around six new levels, and blocked out three of them within the Unity project. I only blocked out three of them because the other three levels were far too conceptual and they were intentionally unfun or unbeatable so that I could iterate upon them at a later stage. The 6 designed levels, and a 7th scrapped design. The three levels that I...

  I am the lead designer of Group 2, the group that is making Portal Packaging. In terms of wanting to refine the player experience for what features we already had pushed into the game, this sprint was extremely successful. After our second sprint, we wanted to make sure that the playtest that we provided to any playtesters would give an accurate assessment of how people would interact with the game if they were uninhibited by any bugs and a decent understanding of what their goal for the game was. The previous sprint, I had primarily focused on making the Narrator system towards the latter half of it. However, during our third sprint, I realized that my priorities were out of order and I should not have started developing the Narrator system so early. The narrator would be a nice addition to teach the player how to play the game, and it still will be an important addition that I will most likely be working on in the fourth sprint. But, considering that we were just entering the t...

 The process of developing Portal Packaging has gone well. All of the members of the team have continued making good progress on the project, and our strong communication has managed to carry over from last sprint as well. Personally, however, I ran into one major issue that stopped a lot of the momentum I was carrying from the initial sprint into this second one.  The main issue that I encountered this sprint was that I took on the task of implementing a Narrator system into the project. I am not an especially well-versed programmer, but because of the workload which Chase, our lead programmer, has been taking on in order to program the main mechanics of the game, I decided that it would be more beneficial to the team for me to program the Narrator which would instruct the player in how to play the game based on what actions they have or have not done. The issue that I ran into was that because I was very unfamiliar with using the Observer pattern in programming, I had a ...