This sprint was a very difficult one. It likely was the one that had the bulk of the work in store for me. What is good is that it has been completed really well and I have a good team to help support me, and now that it is done I expect to move along smoothly with level design.
This sprint I had to remake the tutorial level to accommodate the new move sets for our player as well as make a first official level that comes after the tutorial. I took the card for the second level as well, but would later find that would be too much work. I also took on the challenge of completing our enemy 3 as well as making tracking projectiles.
The first problem I ran into was having a lot of my cards blocked. I wasn't able to start completing the tutorial or level one due to the fact that my teammates were still working out bugs. I chose to work on the enemy first in that case, which took me an entire week to fully figure out. I am not good at programming in Unity, and even with tutorials and help from friends it took me a long time before Enemy 3 was complete. After most of Enemy 3's major bugs were fixed I had to work on his projectiles tracking. This had slightly more to do with my level design role, as I had to test out these projectiles and dial them to a level of difficulty that felt right for our game.
I spent so much time working on things my role wasn't cut out for that I only had a week to make three levels. I had to cut out the second level simply because we wanted valuable playtest results from our levels. When the wall jump was finally completed I could then build the section of our tutorial that teaches the player to wall jump. I then began reworking every map to have wall jump functionality since the system that allows for it requires new prefabs and scripts.
Overall this lead to a very stressful sprint for me and had most of my work pushed until the end to complete, which is something that Level Design can't have.
In order to avoid this I've talked more with my group over this sprint, I received lots of help from both of them, and specifically Colin helped me on Enemy 3's projectile, which I appreciated a lot as it likely saved me hours.
I want more cards relating to level design, and most of our playtest feedback was ripping apart our level's difficulty. It's clear at this point that me taking cards that are vaguely related to level design leads to me not providing enough for our team, so I am choosing to only work on levels now. I think this is most efficient and will help me return to how I was in our first in second sprint, which was productive and helping create a fun game. I plan to just build levels until our game is done as well as tweak small things to help polish in our final sprint. It's important to me that players find our levels fun, engaging, doable, with an acceptable level of challenge, so that is my main priority now. I will take these playtest reports seriously and begin implementing ways to make sure I reach these goals.
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