It’s been a good week for MicroVentures! We’ve just completed the first week of our second sprint and we are moving right along.
Like last sprint, we decided to bite off a big chunk of work to compete. Thankfully, this time we took some advice from our parents and cut up the work into small bite-sized pieces before chowing down! Our tasks this sprint have been much more thought out and we can complete most of them within a couple hours. This means we have no excuse for not completing a bunch of tasks each day! Damn….
We’ve completed a bunch of back-end components like the camera and sound system and the level generator is working better than ever! I’ve been mostly working on getting the story generation framework done so we can integrate it with the level generator. It’s pretty much going to be amazing.
Speaking of amazing, check this screenshot of our game:
Ok, maybe it doesn’t look that amazing, but it is pretty amazing! This is a zoomed in look at what you saw in previous posts and how the game will look. Well, the game will have pretty sprites and buttons and such, but you get the idea. I hope…
Not only have we been making the game more awesome, we’ve also been making the team more awesome! We spent Friday afternoon playing around at the Boardwalk arcade before our dinner at Woodstock’s. Since we had been getting along so well, we decided to introduce some competition! After a round of minigolf (in which we realized we aren’t great at minigolf) we headed to the arcade proper to play some classic games.
A good time and a nice break from coding. Speaking of, I should probably get back to work…
Whew!
We made it! Our first sprint is over!
A sprint!? I thought we gamer types didn’t run… Can you imagine mass of software engineers sprinting? It’s a scary thought, but that’s just what we did! Well … we didn’t run, but we did just finish our Scrum sprint! Instead of pushing our bodies into motion, we pushed our brains and computers to the limit over the last few weeks working on our game.
In just three weeks we planned out everything we wanted to accomplish over the next couple months, made a huge diagram of every little detail we needed to program, and finished an amazing chunk of work. While we aren’t quite done with the entire game, we now have the under-the-hood framework for the game finished, a procedurally generated level with actual game objects scattered throughout it, and a system set up to make touching a phone screen actually control a character! Pretty darn exciting if I do say so.
For the rest of the quarter we can focus on taking this foundation and turning it into an amazing experience for anyone who checks it out. I’m personally really looking forward to working on the story generation portion of our game. I really love the idea of a program generating for itself whatever it needs to keep working and a game that can create its own stories, scenarios, and levels is sooo cool! I can’t wait to hear people playing our game talking about the stories they play though.
Keep in touch! This is going to be a fun development!
MicroVentures 