Kilan Larsen
370 Blog Post 1
After coming up with a game concept and pitching it to the class, we broke into teams and chose which game projects to work on for the rest of the semester. I chose to work on a game we are calling "Gunderground", which is a Metroidvania focused on gun movement mechanics. More specifically, players will use their shotgun to propel themselves through the air and reach new locations, as well as fight enemies. Players start in an underground military complex and must navigate through the base and find new weaponry to help them escape.
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To begin work on this project, we divided up our team of 3 into the roles of project lead/3D modeler, level designer, and programmer. As the most experienced programmer of the group, I will be focusing on that and will be devoting more time and effort into the digital prototype of the game. Before that though, we needed to create a paper prototype to prove the core mechanic of the game (the shotgun propulsion jumping). To better organize the team and stay on track throughout the project, we have a Trello board with a backlog of tasks, an in-progress list of current tasks, and a to-verify list for any tasks that are complete and need to be verified by the project lead.
For the first Sprint, I was tasked with helping to come up with new and unique gun ideas to add into the game, as well as creating a printable Player HUD for the paper prototype. Since I am not in charge of designing the rules or levels for the game, my role for Sprint 1 was rather simple. To make up for this, I also helped to read over the completed rule-sheet for the paper prototype and provided feedback to the project lead to help make it more clear for play-testers.
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The HUD that I created is shown below. A large black box of un-seen area surrounds a transparent area representing the viewable portion of screen around the player, which is the blue rectangle. I also included a health bar consisting of 3 hearts so that the player can see how much health they have remaining at any given point in time.
This HUD is a .psd file which allows play-testers to drop this into our .psd level file and play the game prototype entirely from within Photoshop for convenience instead of having to print it out. Each heart on the HUD is a separate layer and can be turned on and off individually to show damage taken during gameplay.
Due to the small number of cards from Trello that I had assigned for this Sprint, I was able to complete everything I was assigned without issues. I expect this will not be the case for Sprint 2 and beyond, as we will be moving into the Digital Prototype and I will be assigned quite a few difficult programming cards to complete. Looking forward to it!