CAGD 377 - Blog Post 4 - 10/27/2024

  This sprint has been like the others in many ways. For starters, as a group, we have been completing around the same amount of points each sprint. What I did during that time was get the attack started, fix some issues with the UI, and also make it so there is a way to lose in the game. Beginning with the attack system I made it so that every time you merge you get a certain number of damage points added to your damage per second number. After I did that Kyle then took it and plugged it in with his attack button so the player could start an attack on the city they wanted to. In the coming sprints, we will be polishing it up and making sure that it works how the designer thought it would work. At the start, I was not sure what my designer was thinking with how he wanted the damage to be tracked, whether that was taking all the numbers on the board or how I ended up doing it where you get more damage based on how many merges. 

        During the last few playtests, we have not had any UI implemented and that is because the UI was looking different on the phone than the game view in Unity, so What I did was try and figure out why that was happening. I was able to get it working with the different phones and their resolution, so it no longer matters if you are playing on a phone with a high resolution or a low resolution the UI will look the same on both. It was a little difficult to figure it out because I have only ever worked on projects meant for PC and not mobile, so it was just really easy to have those UI fit every resolution as there were only three or four that we had to worry about while mobile has a whole bunch of different resolution screens. For example, my phone has a different resolution than another group member's phone he uses for testing out our game.

        The last thing that I worked on was allowing the player to lose. To do so I had it be that when the player failed the 2048 parts of the game, they would then be met with the lose screen, then I gave it off to a group member so he could then implement the city health that he was working on. After that it was then set to lose when the city still had health by the time the attack finished then you also lost. We might change the 2048 loss to make it auto-attack instead of losing but that is still up for debate within the group.

    The main reason for being against it was because the player must be strategic on how they move the zombies around the board to get more damage so they must pay attention instead of mindlessly swiping the zombies around the board. Another reason to keep it how it currently works is because it is already hard to fail 2048, at least at the lower levels, so if you are struggling that bat at the merging part of the game then maybe you need to lose and restart so that you can get a better understanding of the game. An argument to have us change it to auto-attack is that it could be a good quality of life improvement for the players who are just mindlessly swiping. The majority of the next sprint will be set on finishing the attack feature and also trying to figure out how to get the zombie cubes to animate when swiping. The designer and producer wanted me to figure that out because we were getting a lot of player feedback where they would like to see it animate and not just move super quickly.