s0r: A Text Adventure

The Sprint 0 Round-up! Our goal for Sprint 0 was to complete four things:

• Enemy Types
• Enemies Surround Player
• Damage Received/Dealt
• Enemy Scaling

Are they done? ...That's not the question we should be asking ourselves at the moment. The goal of Sprint 0 is to build a structure, and we've built a rickety structure, you know, so we've got that, and now we can look and try to see why it got rickets.

Design, I thought, was sufficient. Stats were estimated, abilities pitched, all with relative competence, but without the framework of a play-tested game, the fine tuning of mechanics remains a chore. If anything, designers were under utilized, or at least with little to do.

Programming was quickly done. The base tasks proved little challenge, but I fear the real test will be the AI. Of course, this fear is unfounded because I know nothing about the AI script, but I do believe it is integral to the fun of this game, and as such should be worried over.

Truly, the greatest misstep was in art, as we only have 4 artists. This isn't so much an issue of the team, but rather a shortcoming of the idea* which wanted to utilize an aesthetic style as a key value proposition.

In regards to the trinity of specialization, I suspect that the programming side of the equation only grows heavier with the progression of the process, with design worked hardest in the beginning and the artist in the middle. Whether there is validity in the sentiment is secondary, though, to my need to correct my antiquated-Waterfall thought-structure. Programmers are no longer a group, neither designers nor artists. Once our base pipeline is tested, we are feature teams: coalitions of the...willing, I guess. We have individual features to address in all three facets - programming, design, and art - and dealing with only the feature in scope. The base upon which those features are added was concluded with Sprint 0 in accordance with the ideal that the product is always finished, and only continues to get more finished with iterative sprints.






*And most certainly not the idiot who thought it up and promoted it.