CAGD 470 - Blog Post 6 - 11/23/2025

    This sprint was particularly important for the team because we believed it would be the make-or-break sprint. At the start, the game was not looking too hot, but I feel like the product we have right now at the end of the sprint, as well as for our beta build, is a huge improvement, and I feel more confident with the game as of this current version. I did assign a little more point than past sprints, but it was needed, and it was really easy to get the group motivated enough to complete most of them and get most of the big, important cards. Now we have most of the game done, and we are going to be going back and polishing up what we have and making sure that we iron out all the bugs. Even though the burndown chart below shows that we are finishing right on time, there are no new features or any other model type of assets that are going to be put in the game. I have gone through the backlog and cut anything that could be a big change to the game, as we do not have time to make sure that it gets in and it works with everything else.

    Besides the normal producer work of managing the Jira board, meetings, check-ins, etc. I also went through and did some small changes to our level select screen and added a screenshot of the level as a button to be a little preview of the level. It is a small change, and I do think that our designer was right about changing it because now that the level select menu looks like a different menu than our normal main menu. I did do this at the start of the sprint, and now that we are much closer to the beta being built, it is being discussed whether or not we should include a level select. If we do decide to keep it, we might do something where players can only select levels that they have played, so that a new player cannot just throw themselves into level 3 right off the bat.

    Another small change I made was going through and adding audio cues for the player when they collect sun motes, as well as when they recharge at a sun pillar. The sun motes audio was simple as finding something that was a small audio clip and then having it play when the player collects a sun mote, while the pillar I had to find an audio clip that was the same length as the recharge time as well as making sure that it only plays when the player is recharging and not just standing in front of the sun pillar. In the end, both were very simple, and I think they add a nice touch of audio to the levels, as they can seem pretty quiet at times.

    The last thing that I did was add a tutorial menu and have the player be forced to see the tutorial menu when playing the game through the play button. After the last play test, we saw that many players were confused about a lot of things in the game, so they did not understand what to do. So to make sure players know what is what at the start of the game, we added a menu that has pictures of things in-game, and it explains what they are and what they do. That way, we can ensure that if players do not know what to do, then it's on them because there is a tutorial that they are forced to at least see, and if they choose to read it, that is up to them.