CAGD 470 - Sprint 4

CAGD 470 - Sprint 4

Production Process

The production process for this sprint was a bit lax in terms of how much work we all were able to get done. Spring Break broke up the pacing a bit which made it harder for most of us to focus solely on getting work done the week prior and after. I anticipate that this upcoming sprint we'll grind much harder and accomplish much more.

Issues/Problems/Solutions

One of the larger issues we ran into was having people leave early over break. This meant not as many points could be completed. However, my team deserved their break as they crushed the previous two sprints. To solve this I will personally contribute more to asset creation to motivate my team to also grind harder.

Another problem was that our playtest was conducted with a small group of familiar testers. This meant that feedback was not as critical or substantial as being able to playtest outside our first group of testers. Most play testers did not fill out the playtest either which made it hard to interpret data since we had a limited pool. This meant we had to rely more on feedback that was noted during the actual playtest. This was still useful, but we could not expand on any data inputted. 

Sprint Kickoff

Sprint Kickoff went mostly smooth. We did have to redistribute tasks according to changing priorities. Generally, I'll assign people tasks from the get go according to previous workloads. This means that I'll look at the average amount of points per person and try to assign based off that. This sprint we had much fewer points assigned at the beginning than previous sprints. This was preferrable because it didn't overwhelm people with a mountain of cards. 

Work Completed

To start, I completed the textures for the foliage props I modeled at the end of last sprint. I used a 1K texture sheet since the props are very small and they don't need much detail. I used a few more detailed textures and and blurred them to reduce them to color variations. The style of our environment is low-poly and simple colors. This follows the design philosophy of the wands which have a lot of color variation, but not much textural detail.

Floor 1 Foliage Props

Following this, I went back to our backlog and redid almost every card that was already there to make it clearer what was being asked on each one. Descriptions are now far more detailed and I've gotten less questions about them as a result. I also created over 200 new cards to flesh out our backlog. This helped a lot in terms of gaging scope and determining what we needed to cut back on. Otherwise, our game would not be in a finished state by the time the class ended.

Jira Sprints and Backlog

Following this, I worked on getting the walls redone for the first floor. I used the previous walls as a reference for scale. My walls did not move outside the bounds of the previous walls. I made them so that they would tile properly when stacked next to each other. They worked well, albeit with a few oddities in the size of some bricks on the corners. I then textured them using vertex colors and using a fill layer in painter. I had to use color selection on a black mask in order to just apply one color to each section. They turned out much to my liking and reflected the art style of all other props and assets.

Floor 1 Modular Set

Work Incomplete

Most of the work left incomplete centers around the HUB area. I wasn't able to get to this section just yet due to the high demand of models required for it. I still have to make the buildings, floors, props, and VFX for the area. Thankfully, we already have a system in place for the HUB when these assets get created.

Current Work

I'm currently working on getting the walls/floors done for shops since it is a unique environment.