Sprint 3 - RIP Mecha Fighters, Hello PermaCheck

This sprint was definitely an interesting one and different than any I've worked on previously. Mecha Fighters unfortunately has stopped development and our team has disbanded. This was mainly due to outside stress overwhelming one of our team members and he felt it best for his own mental health to step down from the project. I wish him nothing but positivity and good luck for his future endeavors and I hope he is able to make great things. I was not too emotionally attached to the project, so I didn't feel too much disappointment in having to stop development, which I am grateful for. However, this did leave myself and my other team member in a bit of an odd limbo for a short period. Luckily, we were quickly able to meet with the professor and figure out what route we wanted to take moving forward. We both weren't too confident in our abilities to take over the work of our former team member, so we ultimately decided to disband and be placed into other teams that most needed extra work done.

I ended up being placed into the team developing PermaCheck. PermaCheck is a rogue-like tower defense game based around the rules of chess. The player must buy and place various types of chess pieces such as bishops, knights, and pawns to defend their king and queen against waves of incoming enemies trying to take them out. The genre is actually the same as my previous project, so it was fairly easy to get an idea of how the game was supposed to play and function. I was also lucky enough to be able to playtest the game on one of my new teammate's phones, as they were able to sideload it while they worked on getting it onto the Play store.

My current role in this team is that of a flex artist, so I will most likely be working on things like particle effects, materials, User Interface assets, sound effects, and so on. As of Sprint 3's conclusion, the team has been trying to adjust to this sudden shift in team dynamics and finish fixing up any issues they were in the midst of dealing with. There was a lot of difficulty getting the game up on Google Play for internal testing, and as of the posting of this sprint update I believe it still needs troubleshooting. Since they were quite busy this sprint, they were unable to assign me any cards with tasks to complete, so I've just been focusing on observing their work and talking to them about how the game functions and what everything is meant to do.

We have begun assigning cards for Sprint 4 as of class last Thursday, though the Producer did not have enough cards to provide both myself and him with enough, so we will be having a meeting early this week to finish assigning those points to both of us so that we have enough work for the rest of the sprint. For now, I've been assigned cards related to various particle effects for the player pieces, enemy pieces, and projectiles and how they all interact with one another. So far, I've figured out how to create a glow effect around the edges of the projectile meshes using overlay materials.

I'm surprised by how simple this was to achieve and how easy it is to tweak, and I am very happy with the visual result, as is my team. I'm going to refine the look of this effect, and continue working on my knowledge of particle systems in Unreal to create the rest of the desired effects in my cards. I look forward to learning more about it and creating some cool visual effects!