Alternalien Development Part 7: Crash Course in Agile

All development stopped today as we relearned Agile methodology.  We went over the basics, and even a few new things that I didn't know.  Agile is supposed to have 5 meetings, and we were only doing one of them.  They are in order: Backlog Grooming, where the Product Owner cleans and adjust the backlog for features that are going into a sprint.  Sprint Planning, where a feature team decides what goes into the next sprint.  Daily Scrum, which we call Stand Ups, are when team members give a brief report on what they've been doing and any impediments.  These are done before and during a sprint.

After a sprint has concluded, we then go into the Sprint Review meeting, where we report what tasks were done during the sprint.  Once that has concluded, we move onto a retrospectives, and the difference between a retrospective and a sprint review is that a retrospective is used by a team to make sure the methodology is being applied, while the sprint review is only to report the tasks done.  We decided on a day and an order in which to have these meetings, and this should help us in the future. 

Alternalien Development Part 6: The Freezening

I've started to wrap up the cold Temper animations, with his jump and shoot animations.  The Temper alien functions in puzzle as some that can either melt, burn, or freeze certain objects.  To accomplish this, Temper shoots out an fire ball or and ice ball.  This is an example of a fireball I made to test this out in a script.

This is what the Temper looks like when shooting out a fireball or an iceball.

The reason why there aren't as many frames of animation is because the movement goes by so fast that the eye cannot detect it.

Alternalien Development Part 5: IcyHot

I am continuing with the animations for Temper's fire form.  The difficulty in this is getting the fire on his head to move right.  If you look closely at a lot of fire in games, the frames move either randomly or is mirrored.  An example of this would be the fire animation from The Legend of Zelda.

But while making the animations for the fire form, I've tried to implement a more sophisticated method in animating it, the flames on his head moves more in relation to where it was in a previous frame.

Alternalien Planning Part 4: Crusher Animations

I've started this week with creating the initial key frames of the Crusher alien.  The Crusher was initially concepted in being a pink bubblegum like creature who could transform his fists in wrecking balls.  However, it was changed to a simple punching motion.

Above is the Crusher's run animation.  The key frames were inspired by the Mario's run in Super Mario World.  The inbetweens were done by Taylor Passow.

Alternalien Development Part 3: Market Value

We did an exercise today where we came up with all the possible features that would go into this game.  It was everything from the high concept of platforming to a single floor tile.  We were then given Monopoly money to assign what each of us thought the value of that feature was.  The highest was the concept of movement as a basic need with a score of 3161.

After we returned from that, we immediately got into planning for the first sprint with three teams.  Two were designing two arctic levels, while my team was completely animating the Crusher.  Our first sprint begins next week.

Alternalien Development Part 2: The Cave continued

After sleeping on the problem of huge, detailed matte backgrounds.  I came up with a solution that I brought to the PO.  Instead of using painting for the backgrounds, I suggested we use tiled backgrounds.  This is one I made for the Base levels.

This is much better for a few reasons.  It allows for a lot more variety, instead of relying of the artists to take hours to make three or four backgrounds, the designers can make their own custom backgrounds.  Plus, it stylistically fits in with the art style; simple and minimilistic.  The PO liked this idea and has now tasked the art team with making tilesets for all four biomes.

Alternalien Development Part 1: Jump Free

We continued to plan for Sprint 1 by doing planning poker.  Planning poker is an agile technique that uses numbers in the Fibonacci sequence to give effort scores to various features.  Being the Art Lead, I put all the various sprite an backgrounds and we voted on their values.  Usually, floor tiles take the least amount of effort, while characters and backgrounds take significantly more.

These are some example character sprites that took around 30 min - 1 hour work.  They may not look like much, but most of the work went into tweaking them just right.