CAGD 377 - Blog Post 1 - 9/15/2024

     On this game development team, I am the only programmer and so I have a lot of responsibilities. Sadly, I have failed my team during this sprint by not completing most of the work assigned to me. I have no excuses for why I put off all my work, but it happened, and we have talked about it and it won't happen again, and I will try my best to make up for what time was lost during this last sprint. I believe that subconsciously I was stuck and did not know what to do and thought by putting it off I would be easier later, it was not, and I would have no problem finishing. Getting off of that I was able to get one of the most important things done this sprint which was getting the unity project set up and ready for us to create the game on the Google Play Store. Afterwards, I was working on our swipe to move but I was unable to finish the card before the sprint ended so it had to be put off until the next sprint.

    

    Next sprint what I am doing is finishing the swipe feature as well as making it so that if you swipe two of the same zombies together then they will merge and make the next tier. I have a few ideas on how I will make those things work and also what might be the best option, so it does not just break the game and allow the player to swipe zombies off the map as well as not allow the player to swipe and have two zombies that are not the same merge together. Following that I will be making the zombies spawn in at random after swiping into the empty spots. I am excited to mess with this because having things happen randomly throughout the game or prototype has always been a struggle for me because it never seems to work very well for me. I know nothing in a video game is ever truly random, but it is either I am super unlucky and the change in random behavior or random spawn is always the same or very similar or it just breaks the project, and I have to just scrap the random part.

    Some of the code I was thinking that I might have to do with the merge zombies was either I would have the zombies quickly despawn then spawn in the next tier when merged or I would have a parent object that has the different tiers as children than when the merge happens which child object that is activated would change along with the stars to reflect the zombie getting stronger.

    As a group, we were looking at our Trello board and noticed that we might need to add more cards to the game or maybe try and split the epic cards up a little more to try and make it so we will not finish the game too early. The designer and producer are discussing what could be added and I am giving a few ideas as well as they are asking me if it is possible and how difficult it would be to have that feature added into the game. I am trying to do better, and I am really excited to see how this game will turn out.