Some Complications
Due to a family incident, Connor was unable to do a lot of work for the game this sprint, which left me as the only person on the team working in engine. The workload was still about what I expected for myself, but I don't think I planned things as well as I could've. By the time QA came around, there were a lot of things that I still wanted to fix, and I think it probably had a big impact on the QA results.
QA Results
Like I said before, the prototype had a lot of big issues that I wanted to fix, so I felt it didn't show as well as it could've during testing. There were only a few testers this week, but to my surprise, tester feedback was slightly better than the previous sprint. The puzzles were still pretty simple to get past, so it's good to know that the level is still good as an introductory level. Unfortunately, some of the testers couldn't make it to the final puzzle. Getting the prototype ready for QA was a bit rushed, so I wound up not testing certain parts of the level properly, which left the level with some hard-to-make jumps. Since QA, I've fixed this issue along with changing some of the moving platforms to only move if you are a certain coin.
Much like the previous session, a lot of testers ran out of currency, and had to restart the game. In the end, I decided to change the system so that now, changing coins doesn't spend currency. This'll hopefully make the level quite a bit easier for the player to work with, and make it more enjoyable.
Sprint Takeaways
After I made the post-QA adjustments to the game, it made me realize that I might be saving some of my work for too last minute. For the future I want to try and get more in-engine work done before QA, which can make it much less stressful for myself. I also think that doing this can give the rest of the team a better understanding of what I have ready for QA.
Next Sprint
Connor is still dealing with family issues, so this coming sprint is looking like it's going to be a bit lighter on work. There's also the fact that I'm not going to be able to do as much in-engine work myself. What I do want to get done for this upcoming sprint though is flushing out the game systems that we have planned, so that it'll be easier for everyone to understand more of the game. The team has also decided to change the theme of the machine that player will be in from an arcade cabinet to a slot machine. After getting more feedback, it sounds like this is the more preferred direction for the game. This is going to change the a few things about the level, but we all agreed that it should be relatively easy to adapt what we have so far to the new theme.
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