Reworking the Game Design Document
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This week has seen several revisions to the game document once more as the project prototype is fleshed out to meet demands for testing. These will be the main focus of this week’s post, beyond a quick review of the work done last week and examination of how Scrum has worked for our team. Scrum I worked as a producer and hence held Scrum management as my extra assignment, setting up a product backlog for future development and giving out tasks to the team, estimating work hours and difficulty. These estimations were most likely going to be quite wrong, as told by our Scrum Master, which is why I presume many kept them very low. And so they were, sometimes ending up taking double the time assigned to us, especially on the programmer side. For the most part all assigned work was completed on time, with others finishing up during the weekend.
Document Changes Further alterations were made to the original design document we had been assigned, in the form of changes to player appearance, the target planet/level, and several additions to gameplay. For starters the player and their boss are no longer human, but a “Star Trek alien” in the form of a human colored red adorned with feelers on their heads. This is to enhance the absurd humor of the game and fit in with the early Sci-fi feel much of its weaponry has, but also to drive home the point that the aliens you are shooting down (which are now regular humans) might not be considered the “bad guys”, as they appear on screen in quaint houses with jet engines, presumably looking to settle more than invade. Testing of the prototype enemies we had so far on paper, and seeing other variants of space shooters and how they handle shooting, made us realize that we had very few ways of making shooting actually evolve as the game went on. Certainly we had the ability to add the freeze ray described in the original game document, but that temporary change did not give a sense of progression, especially as more enemies appeared. The power plant upgrade worked to resolve this somewhat, but immediately another problem came up, that of the player no longer having a reason to NOT shoot their gun. For this reason, we have added recoil to our main weapon, that sends bullets spraying to the sides when fired for too long.
Next week will be our document hand-in, and where our first Alpha should have started taking shape.  |
