Blog Post 4

    

Konner Rooney

10/2025

2258-CAGD-370-01-4196

11/2025


Blog Post 4


Unique Circumstances of This Sprint


    At this point in development, we have fully moved past the Paper Prototype phase and are committed to focusing solely on the Digital Prototype. This sprint, compared to Sprint 3, helped me get further used to what this would entail going forward. 

During this sprint, I created several new level types: a compacted boss arena, a level that tested the player's color mechanic knowledge, and a level whose success was determined by performance in combat with enemies. Each of these levels had to be playable, testable, and visually readable in-engine. 

Additionally, this sprint had many more of our team’s programmer-side tasks that directly intersected with my level design. Their work on damage, UI, enemy movement, and knockback mechanics meant I needed to create spaces with sufficient clarity and breathing room for testing. This required much more communication and cross-discipline coordination than in previous sprints.

Problems and Solutions


    The biggest challenge this sprint was pacing and prioritization. A part of this stemmed from my health being all over the place over the past couple of weeks, and I was having a lot of trouble settling down to work on time. Not necessarily due to overload, but due to my own procrastination. While everything was finished on time, it was within a day of our established deadline. This ended up affecting my work in areas outside our game as well.


I hope to mitigate this by working a little bit towards everything every day, so I don't feel overwhelmed by one big project and feel the need to put all of my effort into one thing and give lackluster or last-minute results for other areas.

Sprint Kickoff


    For Sprint 4's kickoff, I was assigned three levels to create Annotated Maps for...

  • A level where the player can fight a strong enemy in tight quarters.

  • A level that requires players to clap their gauntlets to color specific ziplines and reach higher platforms.

  • An arena-style combat level, where the player faces many enemies at once in an open, circular structure.





These were designed not just as levels, but as demonstrations of core mechanics: color mixing, ziplines, enemy management, and combat pacing. Each of my tasks was worth 1 point, since they were mostly built with premade pieces.


Work Completed


    I completed all of my tasks for this sprint! Each task was worth 1 point (as previously mentioned, levels were created using pre-made objects), meaning I completed a total of 3 points this sprint. While this number was relatively low compared to my teammate's, much of their work focused on refining and properly implementing the levels and their mechanics. That being said, we want those numbers to be within a good range of each other, which led to me being assigned 5 points for Sprint 5. Quite the fitting number!


Incomplete Work


    There was no incomplete work from this sprint. 

Work in Progress


    As we move into Sprint 5, several tasks are either still ongoing or about to begin:

  • Creating the following levels:

  • An open level with a lot of enemies and few doors so players can expierment with the color mechanic further.

  • A fast-paced level to test players' reaction skills.

  • A linear level so the player can easily grasp movement and mechanics.

  • A level that is especially relaxing to play.

  • Incorporating checkpoints throughout levels.

  • Iterating on previously completed levels to match updates in mechanics, enemy AI, and physics.

  • Preparing levels to be imported into Unity, which includes organizing shapes, planning colliders, and making models consistent in scale.

  • Supporting programmer tasks by building environments that allow UI, knockback, and enemy behavior systems to be tested safely and effectively.

Overall, Sprint 4 was a return to completing all assigned points—something I am very proud of. It helped me regain momentum, refine my workflow, and better understand how my level layouts directly contribute to the team’s Digital Prototype progress.


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