Grapple Gliders - Sprint 5

    Making a prototype was a big first for me. I had never gone through the process of video game development before. It was most definitely a great learning experience, and I can say that it mostly went well, even though there were many things that tripped up our group along the way. Even though the team I was in lost a group member, we were still able to get things done and finish on time.

    I would say that what went right was my lead being able to code the mechanic fairly quickly so we could test it out and make levels. I was also able to set up our project early and we were lucky to have been learning how to code movement in 280 so we could use it in this class. For the most part, creating levels went smoothly (even though I made them late in the development cycle). I went off the annotated map for a level 1 that the former teammate left before he had to drop.

Former teammate's annotated map for an intro level

        I didn't follow the map all the way, but mainly took inspiration from it. 

Level 1 in the prototype

    I mainly kept the levels thin because there’s only one goal post that moves you on to the next level. I wanted the player to be able to see the goal, because it’s a watchtower. A watchtower doesn’t really do its job if it’s hidden. There doesn’t really seem to be a point in making the levels wide since the most obvious path for a player to get to the goal is the shortest path, which is to go in a straight line over there. There weren't any maps for the other levels because I started making our first levels during sprint 4 and there was not a lot of time. I was surprised that a lot of people liked the level design during the playtest. My idea was that the levels would make the player go up and down this line towards the goal. As I continued to make levels, get player feedback and get more familiar with the mechanic, I was able to make more levels that were more varied. My lead liked the fourth level a lot.

Level 4 in the prototype

    I can think of many things that went wrong. The first obvious one is the fact that we lost a teammate, but I kind of felt like it was a situation that had pros and cons. The con was that he wasn’t able to do any work for the first 3 sprints due to family issues. He was our level designer, which meant we didn’t have any levels ready for all that time. But, the pro was that me and the lead could separate tasks much easier. He’d do the coding related stuff, and I’d do level design. Before, I was also a programmer, but mainly for smaller things that the lead shouldn't need to focus on at the moment.
    The most notable thing to me was that when me and my lead worked on stuff related to coding, my stuff would end up breaking and I’d have to spend extra time fixing it. In the 2nd and 3rd sprint, I was tasked to create enemies. While the lead worked on creating and refining the grapple mechanic on the player, the player object would change a lot. That messed up with my enemies’ ability to be able to detect the player. For the shooting enemy, I used a box collider as a field of view that detects the player.
Cannon prefab before the lead fixed it

    The problem with that is that the grapple grapples onto any collider or rigidbody, so in game, it would look like you’re grappling on to the air. I ended up spending time trying to fix the enemies’ issues before the playtest and only until the last second did we really have them ready. To be honest, I think the main problem with all of that is that I am still incredibly inexperienced at coding. My lead was essentially cleaning up my mess with the enemies for the last few sprints.
    
In the future, the obvious thing would be to plan the whole project better. We ended up implementing levels very close to the deadline, and that’s definitely not good. We should have at least one level ready by sprint 2. Now that I have a better idea on how to design the levels for this mechanic, I’d definitely want to change them. As a level designer, I think the levels should have been much longer. While I was making the levels, I was mainly thinking about total beginners to a game like this. I wanted to make the levels simple so that inexperienced players wouldn’t get frustrated and bored going through a giant area. But then the problem with making it easy is that the people who learn the controls quickly know how to essentially skip the level by slingshotting themselves really high with the grapple, and then safely descending on the watch tower with the glide.

Overall, I’m really proud of me and my lead being able to make it to the end and delivering something that people liked. I hope to do well in the future.


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