Chicken Scramble - Sprint 6

  Sprint 6 was mostly a sprint with not a lot to do. I basically had everyone finish up everything they needed to do on the project. Programmers always have stuff to do, but it was a little bit difficult thinking of things for the others to do, since there’s no time to fully implement a new level design and there’s not much of a point in adding new models. It was also time to start working on the marketing images, so I had a person on the team start on those. Since I’m the person who works on the UI, I thought it would be a good idea to begin working on making the menus look a little prettier. I bet players don’t want the default Unity UI in their game.

Figuring out things to do for the modeler and the texturer were somewhat difficult. We were able to find some textures that needed to be done that happened to have slipped through the cracks previously, which was good. But in the next sprint, there’s basically nothing to do. For the modeler, I had him mostly focus on getting the mazekeeper model completed with textures and animations. I understand it was quite a daunting task since modeling a humanoid is kind of difficult. He’s not an animator at all, so going to Mixamo seemed really scary for him, despite me trying to convince him that it was extremely easy to use it. It automatically rigs the model and you get to use a bunch of animations already made for you!

Mazekeeper Walking.

I remember our level designer mentioning at the beginning of the semester that he was going for an art minor, so I thought it would be a good idea for him to start working on the marketing images. In this sprint he finished working on the poster and the title logo. I think the title logo looked pretty neat, but the poster could’ve still used some work. As a producer, I always feel stuck between sending something back to “in progress” or marking it as complete because I really don’t want anybody spending too much time on one task when they could be using it on something else. As long as the idea is conveyed, it’s good enough.

Marketing Poster

In this sprint, I worked on making the start menu and the level select menu look more polished. I had a lot of fun messing around with funny fonts and adding nice looking backgrounds. I looked up royalty free textures online and edited them in Photoshop to be seamless so that they would repeat and not look weird in Unity. The start menu uses a leafy vibe and I was able to use the title logo to make it look even better! The level select menu uses a picnic-like vibe with the gingham behind the levels and the canvas texture for the background. Also, one thing I found out in Unity is that you can make the UI fit any aspect ratio if you select the Expand option in the Canvas settings. I remember when I was playing Frogs of Rage last year the UI getting cut off by the monitors really irked me, so I really wanted to avoid UI issues in this game.

Start Menu

Level Select Menu

Another thing I also did with the UI is attempt to change the resolution of the fullscreen mode according to the aspect ratio of the display the game was on. Previously, I had it set to 1920x1080 in both windowed and fullscreen mode. If you were playing on a monitor that wasn’t 16:9 (like on the classroom monitors), you’d see some ugly black bars on the sides, and the game may or may not look somewhat fuzzy. Essentially what I did was make the game find the aspect ratio of the display and then multiply it to get a resolution in fullscreen that doesn’t make it lag. Before I added the toggles for the fullscreen and windowed modes, the game would lag in an unplayable manner on fullscreen. In the next sprint, I’d like to be able to make it so the player can edit the resolution through the multiplier I used in case they aren’t happy with the current one.

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