[Devlog]Production Sprint 1 Week 3

The final week of the first production sprint is over!During this spring we had to start our game project from scratch and reach the goals we planned as a team in our hack n’ plan schedule.Shifting from Unreal to Unity proved to be really helpful but also added the extra challenge of having to get familiar with another engine all over again.Playing our game more made us question some of our choices and gave us an insight on how to tackle some of the issues we faced along the way.Having said that our first topic for this week was:

1)Should we use change our coroutine manager class to an event system based class?

This is a topic that came up after seeing that our game manager class was a bit redundant in its application(replication of a game loop).An messaging system will probably fit our needs much more and make the overall code a bit simpler.

On to the next question:

2)How can we our ui in a way where it’s not disruptive for the players?

The way we envision our game, there are going to be a lot of effects in screen , players throwing things constantly , props in the background floating in space.It might get a bit rowdy at times and having so too many ui elements might prove an obstacle rather than an aid to the players.We are going to try to keep these elements further away on the edges of the screen and implement things like player health in world space where they won't obstruct vision that much.

Another question that came up during this week was

3)How much time should we spend on some game mechanics to make them feel closer to what we want for the final product, or shorter how much fine tuning should we leave for the polish sprint?

Our team came across multiple bugs in our main game mechanics and while fixing them we noticed that some of them could be a bit more polished and work better to not only make the game more fun but also more easy to control, the problem though in this case was the time spend on “polishing” these mechanics.We decided that some of  them will have to wait for the polish sprint phase.

And the last question of this week being:

4)How can we make the background art in way which is easy for the eye to spot the hamster balls and not too hard to aim and shoot at other players or towards the snake’s mouth.

Right now the skybox we use might make throwing against other players or towards the snake a bit harder.Using more more vibrant colors or changing the hamsterball colors will definitely help with this problem.

PRODUCTION SPRINT 2 PLANS:

For the next production sprint our team plans to implement on the dev side menus, more hamsterballs and the emperor hamster npc and audio!The art team rig the rest of our models and start animating, while working on vfx, menu art and environmental props!Tons of stuff coming along the way!