This is a combination of the planning and retrospective documents from the second sprint (start of actual coding and development) of the game, reformatted and uploaded here for your viewing pleasure.

Planning Notes

Our Goal: To have a playable prototype and basic art assets. 

Topics:

• Workload Division
  • Core Game Loop:
    • Alessandro
    • Mike
    • Abby (if help needed)
  • Overworld
    • Alessandro
    • Mike (If needed)
  • Art/Level Design
    • Abby
    • Cori
    • Alessandro (if magic not open)
  • UI
    • Cori
• Sprint Two Goals
  • Needs:
    • Game Loop 
      • Combat loop and Mouse Controls are layed out 
      • Complete fully & test
        • Need to connect to a scene
    • Overworld
      • Movement 
    • Game State Manager
      • Transition between combat and overworld
    • Art
      • Main enemy sprite sheet 
      • Concept art:
        • Robot Character 
        • Overworld
        • Splash/Title

Reminders:

• Weekly Meeting with Eric/Emily
  • Tuesdays: 2:00 - 2:30pm
• Team Stand-Ups:
  • After weekly meetings (Tuesdays ~2:30)

Retrospective Notes

Game

What went right?

We were able to complete our MVP for the game, implementing a basic game loop with combat and an overworld. Completion of the overworld in and of itself was also an accomplishment, as we originally weren’t sure if we would be able to implement it or if we were going to need to adjust the scope of our game. With all of the basic components of our gameplay loop completed we should have an easier time making additions, like enemy variations and attacks. We also want to add more things for the player to do in the overworld to increase player interaction. Finally, we were better organized this sprint and as a result were able to integrate our work with each other—although we still ran into our fair share of problems on that front.

What went wrong?

Our main issues stemmed from code integration. Since we are all working separately, all our individual work needed to be merged and we waited too long to start integration. This ended up causing a bunch of small harmless bugs that we either kept—such as the menu not working on only the overworld—or were forced to comment out—such as enemies actually being removed from the overworld once they’re defeated. We also ended up running into a few version control issues that came about from two or more of us working in the same file and from infrequent pushing to our Github repository.

What would you do differently?

If we could redo this sprint, we would definitely lay out a more definitive “plan of attack”. We had an idea of what each person on the team would be doing, just not a plan of how we would do it or how it would affect other people's work. Going forward, we plan on thinking more carefully about the structure and architecture of our work. Not only will this help us with the actual programming, it will help our work stay organized and will prevent us from accidentally working on the same thing. Early on in the sprint three of our team members accidentally ended up working on scene transitions in three completely different files, and we would like to avoid that in the future.

Team

What went right?

We were able to get good work done on the project both on an individual and team-wide level. For the most part, we were all on the same page on what we wanted to accomplish and where to go from each mini milestone. Our communication also improved from last sprint and stayed consistent through this one. We went back to having one stand-up outside of the TA check in per week, which was extremely helpful. 

What went wrong?

While our communication improved from sprint one, we still found it failing in certain areas. Had we communicated more frequently about the work we were doing, we wouldn’t have faced so many “overlap” coding and version control issues. Another big problem we faced once again was accountability. Some team members consistently weren’t working on the project. Taking breaks is important and understandable and we all have other assignments, but while some members were working throughout the sprint some were waiting till the end to add their work. This also affected redundancies, as it was hard to tell what was being worked on and what wasn’t.  

What will you do differently next sprint?

Next sprint, we plan on using Slack to help increase both communication and accountability between team members. We also are going to try and use the Trello board more consistently. Along with changing these technologies, we also plan on having more frequent check-ins with one another. This will include giving updates in chat about what we are working on and pushing to the git, as well as alerting the group right away to any problems that might arise.