CAGD 370 - Blog Post 2 - 10/22/2023

This sprint went very well. I feel like the whole group is starting to get used to agile development as a whole. I felt like I was able to appropriately give myself the right amount of work at sprint kick off and only a few things needed to be changed due to a change in the card's priority. While many other teams had to change some of their game in order to fit the requirements all we needed to do was add another movement mechanic to ensure that ours would be unique enough for the prototype requirements. The only thing that we did not understand was that we were able to throw cards back into the backlog, we thought that once a card was assigned that it was stuck in assigned until it was complete. Now that we know we can throw cards back into the backlog it will help with cleaning it up and making the higher priority cards easier to find later on.

This sprint I was able to finish a good amount of work. I ended up finishing the player hand detach the day after we had our sprint two kick off. I was also able to complete a wall climb ability, a key and door system, as well as a grapple ability. The wall climb was giving me some trouble but after a few hours of trial and error, as well as a break from my computer, I was able to get a functioning wall climb down but I would like to go back and maybe change it later if I end up having time and it does not interfere with any other work. The door system was super easy, and I was able to finish that within an hour or so. Lastly, I did a grapple ability, but for the sake of the prototype and time my group and I decided that it is ok if it functions more like a teleport. What I mean by that is that instead of having a grapple hook come out the player and then having them go to the grapple point I have it set up to when they are looking at the grapple point and push Q it will teleport them to the grapple point. They function the same way, but the teleport just skips over the whole grapple part and teleports them straight to where the grapple spot is on the roof.

Finishing the grapple ability felt really satisfying because when I thought I finished it and sent it to my lead to be checked the lead then told me that something is wrong and that there is a bug where the grapple would freeze the character and then they would be unable to play the game. I then spent the next four hours or so trying to figure out what was wrong and also yelling at my computer to just let it work. When I did manage to find what was wrong it felt like such a relief and I felt so much joy being able to send it to the lead and having them tell me that it runs perfectly.

I am super excited because next I get to figure out a way to launch the player like if they were getting shot out of a cannon and I can't wait to start trying to figure that out. My other team members were telling me that if I can't get it to work like where you are watching yourself get launched it will be fine to use a similar teleport that I used for the grapple. In the end I think I can do it and I know that my teammates will like it a lot more if I can get the launch to work.