Senior Capstone: Week 2

Concept Iteration

This week, the team was looking to get our hands dirty with building our first prototypes. Our programmer, Connor, took up the mantle with creating the prototypes for our pigeon game (now called Pigeon Patrol) and our Syrian refugee game (now called Escape From Syria for the time being). As for me, I chose to put together the prototype for our coin game, which we are currently calling "Change Please".

Building The Prototype

For the Change Please prototype, I wanted to build something that could show off the main gimmick of changing kinds of coins, but didn't have to be winnable just yet. What I came up with was a basic prototype that used a basic premise of the system. The player starts out as a penny is presented with a few platforms that they can move between. On each platform is a set of coin fragments that the player can collect and increase their currency. Once currency has reached a certain amount, they can use the buttons on top of the screen to change what kind of coin they are. This affects multiple attributes of the player, like their speed and jump height.

The player is the large circle, and the buttons at the top of the screen are used to change what coin you are.

Sprint Takeaways

The major issue that I had with this sprint was my time estimates for tasks. I think I met the overall total or around that total, but the individual tasks I think had much different times than their estimates. I noticed this the most with how long I guessed it would take me to build the prototype, because it took me about 5 and a half hours when I guessed that it would take only 3 hours. My documentation tasks had the same issues, but I instead overestimated how long these tasks would take. Moving forward, I need to think more about estimations, and I hope that will be fairly easy to do.

Next Sprint

Coming into the next sprint, the team has all agreed that we need to bring the prototypes to QA for testing. Beforehand though, each of the prototypes need to be touched up so they can test them properly. Once we get a good sense of what testers want more of, and what the team wants to do, we can choose which concept will be moving forward with production and which concepts will be cut.