Week 6: SPRINT 1 END

This week we finished Sprint 1. We have made great progress this week and are excited to show it off! All of the essential gameplay mechanics are there and the most important assets and the character aswell. Overall we are satisfied with our progress and are excited to start into Sprint 2. But before that we want to update you on what we have achieved.

The character has come a long way since last time. Finally he has some color and different variations with which we can tell apart the different players. The rig is also done and he can now move. We don't have any animations though so this test animation from mixamo has to do to show off his movement capabilities.

We have also made items, shelves and checkout counters for our level. With these things we have set up the level and now it's already looking much better. We also experimented with new layouts and drastically reduced the size of the level. We think now the player can much clearer see what is on the screen even from a distance and the gameplay feels a bit faster. 

We want to continue to experiment with the layout as we make progress but this is already a lot better than the first iteration we had. We we also made a few items that now spawn all over the scene and can be picked up by the player. As you can see we have a total of 8 items, the drumstick being our most valuable item.

The item spawner was also finished. Now items spawn randomly on the shelves and when a player picks up some items they get replaced with new ones after some time.

We also spend some time improving the item pick up system. We were told that picking up items can feel very awkward or sluggish at times because the game chooses a different item to be picked up than what the player intended. To fix this issue we changed the way the game calculates which item is preferable to pick up. At first we only took the angle into account but now the game also looks at which item is closest to the player. With both of these variables in place, hopefully picking up items feels a bit better for the player now. 

Furthermore we started implementing the UI and the pushing mechanic. Sadly the UI could not be finished in time but you can use the pushing mechanic in the Build we provided. Pushing is one way to get your cart back. It may not be the most peaceful solution but it sure gets the job done.

What's Next?

Hopefully our supervisors will be pleased with this weeks progress. After our weekly meeting we will first have to come up with a plan for sprint 2. That means planning 30 hours of tasks for every member of the team so everyone knows what they have to do over the next three weeks. Afterwards we will continue to work on our game. Feel free to check out this weeks demo. There is a lot of cool, new stuff to see.