Konner Rooney

10/2025

2258-CAGD-370-01-4196

Blog Post 2

Unique Circumstances of This Sprint

    In Sprint 1, I was completely devoted to creating our Paper Prototpye and getting feedback on it via playtests. On the other hand, Sprint 2 had me working on two (fittingly) primary tasks...

• Reflecting on the feedback of our first set of playtests, and how to change elements that were the most criticized.
• Creating Annotated Maps, then 3D modeling them into .FBX files to import into our game engine of choice, Unity.

Having to focus on two different overarching tasks over the course of this Sprint, was definately diffferent compared to creating the Paper Protoype in Sprint 1, which consisted of various small tasks that worked towards one big, significant part of our work flow. That being said, it was a "challenge" worth working through! I believe this Sprint really eased me into managing my time towards different parts of our project, contrasting how I worked towards one big part in Sprint 1.

I expect the future sprints to "work in waves," with some sprints being more focused on one big aspect of our game, and others having us work in various aspects at once. In my own experience working on big projects before this one, not nessessarily in game development, this was a pattern that tended to be established. But if things end up differently, the differences of Sprint 1 and Sprint 2 prepared me on how to tackle it!

Problems and Solutions

    During this Sprint, I got really ill, as I tend to do at the midpoint of a season. This caused me to take much longer in completing otherwise straightforward and quick work. While I was never sick enough to the point of being unable to work at all, I do feel like I could've finished my tasks with more time to spare if I was in a healthier state. Maybe I would've been able to have done a Mini-Kickoff or two! I hope to address that by giving myself a more consisent sleep schedule and keep mind fog from rolling in.

Somewhat related, I also ended up having a small number of points completed compared to my groupmates this sprint, as I split up my time between the first Annotated Map, plus it's 3D model, AND revising the rule sheet. The rule sheet's revisal, while encouraged by my groupmates so we could playtest again, was not a task on Trello. To counter this, I'll be sure to check to make sure tasks like these are included in our backlog, even if it is a new version of an already completed task (of which being the rulesheet of the first playtest), as well as addressing the In Progress and Assigned tasks with them and how much they should be prioritized wth the rulesheet's revisal.

Sprint Kickoff

    For this sprint, I was assigned to create two Annotated Maps, as well as modeling them to be imported into Unity, and incorporating ziplines throughout the level afterwards so that players wouldn't assume that ziplines meant a level was almost over (we want it to be a frequent mechanic for players to utilize).

Work Completed

    In this sprint, I was assigned 7 points and managed to complete 3 of them, as a result of creating the first Annotated Map and modeling it in Maya. While I will admit to this being a suboptimal number of points complete, especially compared to the large amount of 28 points I completed for the Paper Prototype in Sprint 1! However, the silver lining to this is that, when making the first Annotated Map, I made sure to seperate some pieces in building the model that can be reused to create new levels, within the same file! This should make creating annotated maps much faster and more efficient in the future.

Incomplete Work

As previously mentioned in my completed work, I was unable to start working on my secondly-assigned Annotated Map, nor incorporated ziplines in my first annotated. Even with my aforementioned reasoning as to why this is, I couldn't help but still feel dissapointed in myself for the drastic change in points completed in this sprint versus Sprint 1. I chose to remain optimistic though! I do believe that with the work previously completed, I can reuse the tools to make future Annotated Maps go faster, and then have more time to work on other tasks!

Additionally, I didn't have time to perform a playtest with our new ruleset. Part of this is because I'm still waiting for physical pieces to be shipped, as the pieces of paper proved to be difficult to manage, but it was mostly due to me taking a long time to finish the rulesheet.

Work in Progress

The tasks I am currently working on are...

• Creating the Annotated Map for the Bottomless Pit Level 
• Using the building blocks from the 3D model of my first Annotated Map to recreate my Bottomless Pit Level map. 
• Playtesting the new version of the Paper Prototype to see if feedback is more positive, and see if that should impact the direction of our Kinethetics Prototype.
• Editing my Annotated Map of the first level to have ziplines placed throughout, without breaking the foundation of it's original design.
• Create approximately 3 more Annotated Map.

With this, I hope to maintain a steady and acceptable pace going forward!