Capstone Week 18 - Ready Set Go

Today is the start of our first sprint this semester. Ryan F and I were a little dubious over the tasks in the backlog for the tech team right now. We were discussing it at our meta meeting Thursday night, and it seemed like a lot of things that were on there are more new features, when we had discussed the previous week that the first portion of this semester should be focused on polishing the game and getting our core gameplay mechanics solid.

We put forward that the following tasks should be done first:

• Kill box
• Full control remap
• Random tech loadout
• Ranged refactor

After we put this forward and it was discussed by the rest of the leads with us we decided that the last three should definitely take priority. The kill box was no longer necessary after it was decided that the level should be in a Colosseum style, and the level would just be surrounded by a wall due to that. 

Zach and I then spent a good portion of the class time designing and talking over how we wanted the customizable controls screen to work. You can see our different scribblings and thought processes in the image below. You'll also see the different feature teams in the same picture (hence why Zach and I are together).

Along with the customizable controls, I'll be acting as an "adviser" for Ryan F on the random loadout feature since I created the card system itself. One of my first tasks however is to solve the issue we've been having with our GitHub repository. Ever since Demo Day, I haven't been able to push to the repo. Whenever I try, I get this error:

Capstone Week 17 - New Teacher

And so begins the second semester of Capstone! We did pretty well in my opinion last semester and I'm excited to continue that in this semester.

The first big surprise we had was that Emil (who we thought was going to teach this class) did not have enough space in his teaching schedule and so a new hire was brought on, Anupam Das. He has worked at LucasArts and many other big companies working on a range of different things. Personally, he seems like a pretty cool guy and I was especially excited when he said that one of his larger focuses was on shaders, one of the areas of game development I still don't have much exposure to. He definitely has a different style to what we're used to with Mike and Emil, and I think this shake up will work out well for us.

After the introductions and lecture Mr. Das gave us, we began talking about the state of our game, and actually gave him a run-through of our game in its current state (this also served as a demo for the two new members we have, Sam Neils and Randy Grout). He was actually fairly impressed it seemed, he was glad that we had gotten a handle on our game mechanics. One of his biggest concerns though was what he callled "signs & feedback". These are simply what are we showing to the player to let them know that something happened. For example, a player gets hit by a melee attack, they get knocked back and their screen flashes red. These sorts of things are what make a game feel alive and fun, without them there is not much enjoyment or sense of satisfaction when accomplishing something.

We planned out our sprint 0, which will last until next week. Just mainly for testing pipelines again since most of our sprint 0 stuff was done last semester.