Week 3 of Development At The Doghouse

The first week of sprint 2 didn't go to plan, but nothing really ever goes to plan in game development and that is where the team has to work the hardest to keep and track and try to use Agile as best they can.

Week 2 ended with us discovering some issues with the character controller when there were 4 people playing at once, and another problem with the camera when 4 people would run off in different directions. Now under normal circumstances this wouldn't have been that much of an issue but because we are making a game in the middle of a global pandemic we cannot playtest the game as a group as much as we normally could. Meaning that Matt our programmer can't easily test his progress his 4 players as much as he can.

The next time that we would all be in a studio together as a team would be Friday but we discovered these issues on Monday. But the problem of the camera effects other peoples progress as well. See Joe & Harry (the designers) can't finish creating the maps because they don't know how far the camera will go or if players will be able to go behind buildings and hide from the camera. Since they can't finish the map plans they can't give an asset list to our environment artists Cameron & Elliot.. So there's a pretty big knock-on effect.

So what did we do? Joe & Harry worked on the map blockouts as much as they could without the missing information and when they reached their limit they moved onto other high priority tasks that they were going to leave until week 4. They also gave Cameron & Elliot a list of assets that they definitely knew that they were going to need. Thus continuing the agile process. The problems with the camera and 4 player character controllers are now fixed thanks to Matt and Joe & Harry can finalize their level blockouts and concepts at the start of week 4.

We now have blockouts of all 4 characters and Patty & Wren (our concept and character artists) are going to be moving onto given their characters more detail.

Our animator Cameron has rigged 2 of the 4 character blockouts and will be rigging the other 2 and implementing them into the Unity engine to make sure there are no problems at this stage. After the whole problem with the camera we are really trying to see any possible problems as soon as possible.as to not delay our progress any more.

Now that all the problems that we currently have are fixed we move onto creating levels and getting combat implemented into the game.