Sanctum Infernum - Week 4 Development Blog

Overview

During this week I will outline the following:

• Collaborative and agile AAA workflow (Scrum)

• Machination for combo inputs and speed ratings

• Miro board outlining inputs for page mechanic

• Targets for improvement next week

Collaborative and agile AAA workflow (Scrum)

One of the main components of this weeks scrum was to choose 5 page ideas from the documentation that I made for my task last week. However, when going over what other people had worked on during the week it was discovered that another designer decided to take it upon himself to make page ideas when it wasn't assigned to him. I feel that this further shows a breakdown in communication and also demonstrates that people do not feel the need to listen to the task in which they are assigned. This could just be an anomaly. However, if continued I feel that it could call for a change to the sprint schedule, meaning that we would have 2 meetings instead of one in order to make sure everyone knows what they are doing and keeping everyone on track.

Machinations for Combo inputs

Part of my task this week was to create a machinations chart outlining inputs for the DDR mechanic. As I am not too familiar with the workflow of machinations I knew I was not going to be able to represent what was wanted too a sufficient level. Bringing this up to the design leads I tried to outline why I don't believe that the use of machinations would be valuable as I would not be able to do it, as I simply do not know how. As a result of this it was decided that I would use Miro in order to outline the inputs for the mechanic as it would be better to for readability. Before this was decided however, I was able to create a very simplistic outline of how the DDR mechanic would work, this was just represented through a click and move system, where when the player interacts by clicking a trigger it would move a node to either yes or no depending on whether they hit the DDR "Note". Upon reflection I do understand that this doesn't necessarily successfully show off the mechanic but as previously stated I am limited to what I was able to achieve as I am not proficient with Machinations.

Miro Board outlining inputs for page mechanic

As previously stated it was decided by myself and the design leads that it would be more effective if I used Miro to complete my task, as I would be able to show off the mechanic to greater detail. By using Miro, I feel that I was able to achieve this, outlining each individual keypress for the DDR mechanic formatted for the arrow keys (however this can be easily changed if needed). Furthermore, I tried to further develop the idea of the difficulty / rarity system by colour coding each graph accordingly and making the difficulty of the "keypress'" scale alongside them.

This Graph outlines how the DDR mechanic should function including the accuracy system that I first heard about in the previous week. This system should alter the amount of damage / effectiveness of the page depending on how accurate the players "keypress" input is. Additionally, the speed of the DDR tile also should scale alongside the difficulty of the page with each bracket having a specified speed value. These being "Easy" = 1.5 Seconds, "Medium" = 1 seconds, and "Hard" = 0.25s.

In conclusion I feel that I was successful in flushing out and displaying the input system for the DDR mechanic. I hope that as the project progresses I will be able to continue to further flush out the mechanic and get it too the point where it is in the game and functional to a sufficient level.

Targets for improvement next week

I feel that the level that I'm working at in regards to output and contributing to the project is at a sufficient level and if continued will be perceived as a relatively large contribution to the overall project. However, as always there are still instances where improvement is needed. For example, machinations is an area in which I could improve, as in the right circumstances it is a valuable tool to display drop rates etc. So dependant on the task that I am assigned I would like to improve in that area.

Targets:

• Improve on machinations

• keep up contribution level