Sprint 1 Recap

 We have finally completed the first sprint for our game, which also now has a name: Chicken Scramble!

The working title during the sprint was "Maze Party", but we wanted something the correlated more with the story/gameplay on our actual game. I wont lie, this was a very hectic sprint, but based on my previous experience, it always seem like the first and last sprint are usually the most chaotic. As the offical modeler of my group you can most likely guess what the majority of my points were.

That's right, modeling!

Being the the game takes place in a maze, building those components first were very high priority. Since mazes are rather repetitive in the building blocks they use, I decided it would be best if I took a modular modeling route towards this challenge.

The bottom portion in the image above shows a very very small mock up of a maze built of modular components, it was a proof of concept to ensure that all the components actually work with each other.

As of right now, there's roughly 11 modular pieces in the maze; give or take depending on if you count left/right variants. These include:

-Hedge Wall

-Hedge Wall End Pieces (directional)

-Inner and Outer Corner

-Door

-Door Frame

-Door level (two components so it can be animated easily)

-Maze Exit

-Maze Exit Room

-Barrel Power Up

All of these models have also been UVed, as well as their movement and center points being move to the corner of the object. This allows them to be easily snapped in other applications such as Unity, where they plan top be exported. The majority of these models would be referred to as primitives, but is was very important that we immediately had all the modular components done so blocks of levels can be made.

All walls, floor, corners and such are based on a 1x1 meter grid system. Everything works in whole numbers. Some components such as the outer components take up a total of 3 meters, because all of the connecting modular components follow a similar layout, they all connect flawlessly. Any faces that would not be seen by the player were removed, and there are no Ngons in any of the models.

I believe I completed the most amount of points this sprint out of fellow teammates, and had no cards remaining in my backlog. There is a 3 point card in progress, which is modeling the Maze Keeper enemy, which will hopefully be completed within the next sprint. I did not hit any major obstacles during modeling, but did have a issue regarding workflow

I was suppose to base my models off of concept art made by another group member. Without the concept art being completed I could initially not start my work. And since all my work was modeling, I was blocked for every single card I had.

After the first week I simply had to begin my work, so I modeled everything without concept art (after asking permission from the producer and the designer). It was very important that my work was done fast as well, as the texture artist was also blocked until my models had been submitted.

Basically, because this was the first sprint, we had a three person line of backlogs

Concept Artist -> Modeler -> Texture Artist

I really hope this does not happen again as it was stressful not being able to start my cards day 1, or even week 1; and I would imagine the texture artist after me felt even worse.

Besides that everything went pretty smoothly, and the game is on track!