Sprint Review 5

I am the producer for the team called sunset studios in which we are creating the game called suburban descent. Suburban descent is a roguelike horror survival game and which players will need to run around loot houses and get to the garden to upgrade the character and go all the way to the end and survive. For Sprint. 5, this Sprint was really a Sprint of getting a lot of things together and getting some level of togetherness with all the different aspects that we were working on, such as levels all the way to character abilities. I feel as though that this spring while kind of not that heavy, so achieved what we wanted to do and still achieved a good result for the eventual electronic prototype 2 that was due at the end of the Sprint. 


After a meeting with the designer, I reached out to our art department and told him what we desperately needed for the Sprint to be done. I also reached out to the level design department and also programming and told them what they needed to have done. I also realized that the level design department has been working on a lot of the levels, but that also includes adding a lot of props and stuff. So I set my designer to work with the level designer on where to play certain props and where to play certain colliders and such so that the level designer can kind of focus on what kind of level they want to create and the flow of it and make it so it's an enjoyable time. 

As for me, this spring I worked on hooking up a lot of the different character abilities with the garden and hooking up different levels. I also worked on getting The build ready for the electronic prototype 2 submission, and I did this by going through and just polishing/ picking up a lot of the things that needed to be completed or needed to be done prior to the submission. I wanted to make sure the loop of spawning in , running around, looting, going to the garden, and going on to the next level is all in the game. This was decided on between me and my designer to have within the electronic prototype. 2. And we felt that this was a good spot to have this prototype. So come beta build we can just iterate on this and that would be a good rendition/showcase of our game. 

One thing that I worked on extensively was making sure character ability and character stats actually carries through to each level. What, I mean by that is, The way our game is set up, The garden is an in between place between the different levels and it's its own scene, so we need to make sure that all player data is actually going through each scene and not just left in one. We had not necessarily an issue but a Little Thorn in that a lot of The stats will just stay in the scene and that they wouldn't carry over or only certain things would do. This problem would especially arise with character abilities because they would get got in the garden, but they would not continue through into the other levels. So I had to manually code a way for the character that is from level one that essentially does not get destroyed after each level transition. However, It actually goes through and it keeps all the different character stats between each level so that you actually feel what you are going to get in each level.


Mentally I am disheartened as the producer not because of my team, but because I just don't understand/ like the role of a producer and I'm doing it because I have to. I don't understand what Dan wants from me to on one side. I try to do my best to sign work and try to assign what needs to be done and I feel like Even though there's a good amount of work being done, it's never enough and that I will just amount to nothing at the end of everything.

Sprint Review 3

I am the producer for the team called Sunset Studios creating the game Suburban Descent. The vision statement for Suburban Descent is a roguelike horror survival game where you go through neighborhood houses trying to survive against zombies to make it back to your safe house and make it till dawn. For this sprint, my team and I really tapped in and got a lot more work done and we also had a goal that we wanted to achieve. The goal was to have a prototype ready by the end of the sprint. We wanted to have something that people can try out and give feedback on that was actually based on the computer and not paper.


This sprint started off with moving over a lot of cards that were in the previous sprint and my idea was that I wanted these done first before I assign a lot more work. I wanted to get some basic mechanics implemented so that next sprint, we can focus on the upgrade path. 


This sprint we got a lot of models implemented within the level and even if textures aren’t in, there is a sense of where the models need to go and allows us to see the scale and method of the levels. This was helpful for playtests because it gives a pretty good idea of how the level will play out with the models given and can be adjusted if need be. 


There was also a lot of character mechanics programmed within the game

Sprint Review 2

I am the producer for the team called Sunset Studios creating the game Suburban Descent. The vision statement for Suburban Descent is a roguelike horror survival game where you go through neighborhood houses trying to survive against zombies to make it back to your safe house and make it till dawn. The core game loop that encapsulates the game is that players will enter a room needing to either exit the room without alerting any enemies, or fight them off and kill them. They will also need to find supplies in these rooms to either refill their gun or heal themselves, since these resources are scarce, otherwise they will be restricted to just a steel pipe to deal damage.


For sprint 2, I decided to up the ante and increase the number of cards on things that needed to be done. After a little bit of a talk from Dan regarding how producers should look at the amount of cards assigned in sprint 1, I went harder on assigning things to everyone and wanting more features to come out of the sprint. From the start of the sprint to the end, I had assigned about 75 cards in total, which comes out to about 12 ish per person. While this was a large amount of cards, I made sure they were core concepts that can be completed for each person. 


Having so many cards assigned was a dual edged sword because it also had to be weighed evenly between everyone when there was clearly more work that other people needed to do while some people got a lighter load. The programmer Rodrigo got a heavy set of cards purely because as the programmer, he needs to code a lot of the features within the game so that we have a functioning game. On the opposite end, the designer, Jacob, didn’t receive as many cards because he is focusing on the overall vision of the game and is handling smaller things like some UI stuff or music. This was a difficult thing to manage for me because as a learning producer I wanted to not have an uneven distribution of cards rather, everyone have an equal or close to an equal amount of cards. This was a huge learning moment for me as a producer because I had to come to the realization that there will be unevenness within the card distribution purely because of real world variables that are in play. As we have only one programmer, of course he would take the brunt of the work in that way while others are still doing meaningful work, even if it's less cards in the sprint.


So for this sprint, I worked on getting early UI prototypes up and running for our game. I wanted to get a basic pause menu and a script that can handle all these basic interactions. UI will be changed later on as it gets connected to the game in various ways like a mini map and stuff but I didn’t have much else within the sprint that needed to be done for an early prototype.



 Sprint Review 1

I am the producer for the team called Sunset Studios creating the game Suburban Descent. The vision statement for Suburban Descent is a roguelike horror survival game where you go through neighborhood houses trying to survive against zombies to make it back to your safe house and make it till dawn. The core game loop that encapsulates the game is that players will enter a room needing to either exit the room without alerting any enemies, or fight them off and kill them. They will also need to find supplies in these rooms to either refill their gun or heal themselves, since these resources are scarce, otherwise they will be restricted to just a steel pipe to deal damage. 

Before the sprint started, we had a stupid ass shuffle of teams in which we had to group up with people that we couldn’t brainstorm with. Even though this was a little hard, it was understandable so I went to another group and was happy. However, we had to reorganize again so I got stuck with a team and game that I didn’t really want to work on but now I have to.

As this was the first sprint, it was the start so we started off by first setting up what we needed to do and what we needed to make. We first broke up what roles everyone was going to undertake. I took the producer role and so I started to set up the cards and points for the sprint. 


We switched to Jira from Trello for this class but it is pretty similar to Trello. I negotiated with my teammates on what they wanted to accomplish or work on this sprint. I definitely wanted to work more as a better producer for this project because I don’t want to be the weak link. As a producer, it's my job to be kind of like the glue or the holding together and I want to do a better job in this realm. After negotiating with my team, I took the time to work on the backlog so I can have a good amount of stuff and cards and plan for the future. 


While my teammates worked on their own things, I took some time to iron out other stuff. I worked on getting an ALR up for our modelers. As there are a lot of models to create and then UV and then texture, I wanted them to have a library to see what models need to be made or what has been made. 


Going into the future, I want to be able to work on the UI for the game as it is a big part of the game that no one has really touched and so I also wanna do things in the game. I would love to work on the lighting but more likely than not that's a future thing. After that, I will probably just be a helping person who works with all the other people and if they need help with anything else that's being done or things that someone might not be able to do all at once. I definitely want to take a sprint just to go over polishing the game. I think if we don't take the time to polish, it'll be just ok as a final result with little bugs or emptiness in certain spots. However, having even a week to polish will be super beneficial to the game and the completeness of it. It will also help with the cohesiveness of the game and make us take a second to catch our breath rather than just cramming a bunch of stuff in the game.