370 Blog Post 4

       For the fourth sprint, our team worked fairly well together, but were met with a family emergency from one of the members. Unfortunately, this led to certain game elements being left out altogether, since the workload was too large for the other members to take on. We assigned cards, but partway through the sprint, we realized our priorities had changed and we needed a few card alterations to reflect that. We adapted well, however, and our playtest went smoothly.

    First, I had the task of creating a way to tell the players they needed to destroy more blocks to end the level. Now based on the trello board, I should have designed a prompted message that only displays when the player reaches the goal flag without destroying everything. This makes sense because our game is a time trial-style game, with the objective to finish as fast as possible. However, when I began work on the scripts, I realized I had accidentally begun to create a counter that would tick down based on the amount of red blocks in the scene. I decided this would work just fine, and give the players a more direct incentive to destroy the blocks. A picture of the finished UI element is shown below, as seen in game.

Unfortunately, I did not design the script properly, and I realized the script was attached to the player character, which was unloaded between scenes. Because of my failure to test the script properly, we had to cut the feature from the prototype altogether. This taught me that I need to: A. test all of the game mechanics between scenes, and B. I need to test my scripts in the newest version of our levels. I realized during the making of this script that I was working with our old levels, which had red as the block-placement area, while our new level designs have green as the designated color. Because of this, I was forced to completely halt my workflow, and it was entirely because of my own shortcomings.

Next I had the main task of finding, implementing, and testing new sounds for certain actions, such as placing a block, destroying a red block, and using an item. Finding the correct sound turned out to be quite a journey, and taught me that I am a perfectionist. I searched through many different free sound websites, and made sure all of them were free and safe to use. Then I found each individual sound, and began the work of learning how to implement them into the game. This process was fun, and made me realize that audio design is an area of game design I never considered, but is absolutely necessary for large-scale game development studios.

First, I had to find the sounds. This process took somewhat longer than expected, since many websites were either full of pop-up ads, or dealt in music and sounds for purchase, rather than sounds completely free to use, no strings attached. However, once I found a few sites that worked, the process of finding the sounds was quite fun. I was just browsing around, deciding which sounds fit each action. Then if I couldn't find the proper sounds, I would find a new website that fit my criteria, and continue searching.

The only feedback we received regarding the sounds was the volume. Apparently, some players felt the sounds were too loud and startled them. I had not considered this, since I usually have my computer's volume fairly low when working on classwork. Now, however, I know to test the sounds I pick at different volumes to account for the different circumstances players may be in when they test the game.