It's that time of the week again! Development was slowed this week due a lot of extra work setting ourselves up with iOS and Android development environments and planning the next few weeks of work. We still managed to get some new features into the game, though, which you can check out in the video below:
Features highlighted this week include:
- Background art that scrolls as you explore the dungeon
- First player animations
- Main menu blocked in
- First sound effects implemented
- Wide variety of weapon types implemented: slash, uppercut, bullet, shotgun, boomerang, meteor, mine, and more!
This was our sixth week of development, which means next week we start
Sprint 3!
For those of you unfamiliar with software development methodologies, "sprints" are a way of planning out your work to keep everyone on task during the extended, complicated, and often surprising process of developing a piece of software.Specifically, our team is using the agile development methodology known as Scrum, dividing our work into a series of three week sprints leading up to the game's release date and the end of development. At the start of each sprint we plan out all the tasks that we will be working on for those three weeks and assign values to them based on how long we expect them to take. Each day we meet to discuss our progress, take new tasks from the list, and track if we're getting as much work done as we need to be. Assuming all goes to plan, at the end of each sprint we should have completed all of those tasks and the game will be significantly further along in development.We had a successful second sprint, with some areas of development progressing farther than we planned and expected, held back only by one or two tasks that were not developed to the extent that we wanted. These tasks rolled over into the backlog of tasks to be tackled during the next sprint, while the others were sorted into the ever-growing pile of completed tasks.Then, a day's worth of planning and meetings later, we wrote out the rest of the tasks that we will be taking on before our GDC demo deadline. Then we slapped them up onto the wall unceremoniously. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Sprint 3:
See you on the other side!
