Blog Post 1
Robo-Factory
Blog Post 1
At the beginning of our sprint, our team set out to build the foundation of our mobile idle game by developing concept art and visualizing our game systems in order to keep the team focused on core vision. As the programmer, my tasks were focused on user experience within our game, as well as how our game systems would work after we began developing within Unity.
As our team concepted a plus-one game mechanic for our game design, we decided that our paper prototype should test the additional mechanics too see how well it would fit into our game, and more importantly, if players would have fun on the turn-based combat mechanic. For this prototype, we developed a simple set of rules based on 3 core attributes to change gameplay based on how a player built their fighter. These attributes (health, damage, defense) were designed specifically for counter-play between players, but quickly exposed a few flaws in the balance of the game during our playtests.
First, we noticed that there were only 2 types of strategies being used. Every piece from a single category to maximize a single attribute or one of each part, maximizing nothing. This showed us that players were not seeing enough benefits in spending time with customization, and that they wanted to just jump in and play. We also noticed that Defense as a core stat was severely over-tuned compared to the bonuses provided from other builds. This led us to changing the stat bonus early within our playtesting to bring it back within the expected usage.
After getting feedback from the paper prototype, we were confident in our vision and mechanics and started getting ready for digital production within Unity. First, I created a small mock-up wireframe within Adobe XD to see if the idea would work on mobile screen resolutions while still allowing for clear player interaction on each main scene. This model provided us with a lot of feedback to move forward with in the planning stages.
My next assigned user story tasked me with getting a class diagram of how our components within Unity would be connected. This document is to give the entire team a way to visualize the scripts that will be implemented, as well as allow easy modification to keep our diagram up to date with our project. Along with preparing this document, I spent some time finding mobile screen resolutions to add to the Unity game window for editor testing.
My task was getting our project hosted on GitHub and making sure that our entire team had collaborator access and knew how to push and pull from various branches. To do this, I set up a base 3D URP project within Unity and created a quick launch scene. I then uploaded this project and created a .gitignore file, as GitHub was not ignoring our log file changes.
As we move into the second sprint of the project, our goal is to have moved entirely over to the digital phase of development and create a digital prototype. To accomplish this, I will be working on implementing our basic player input functionality, as well as building out our basic game systems so that we can start getting players hands on the prototype.
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