Galaxies Collide Itch Launch

This project started as one for school, where our main goals were to add mechanical systems on a prebuilt kit, and we had to follow Agile and Scrum planning practices. Our main additions to the FPS micro kit were a new stealth system, meteor shower events, differing enemy types, power ups, and much crosshair customization. Crouching causes enemies to lose sight of the player, and when close enough the player can perform a stealth takedown by pressing 'Z'. These takedowns are a little finnicky to actually perform, but they do work.

Our development process started each sprint with a session of planning poker that was facilitated mainly by the Scrum Master, but sometimes by me when needed. After we went through our backlog and moved tasks to the frontlog, we would determine the difficulty of each task and rate them. Based on the difficulty, we assigned members to the individual tasks. Each part of the development team had their own folder to upload weekly sprint work into, so our build master could pull everything and compile it together. We tracked tasks with Trello, but the team's QA also had a Trello board set up for any bugs that he found. After each sprint I would host a retrospective for the team, which went over what went well during the sprint and how we could improve. This project gave me a lot of insight on the practices of Agile, like hardening sprints, and using planning poker in general to analyze your sprint's tasks.

Some major things that I learned during this project's first development phase are:

• Editing/creating systems around the physics withing Unity 3D can be complex.
• Fixing bugs as soon as they are found is crucial to keeping the project's development pace constant.
• Keeping a visual representation of ideas, tasks, or even bug reports, helps keep the project organized.
• Documenting code while it is being written will save a lot of time in the future and keep scripts easy to understand.
• UI matters a lot to a player's overall experience and should be treated as a main pillar of development.
• Creating an in-game menu is crucial, and it is even better to have a way for the player to access the main menu easily.

This first phase was launched to itch.io on 09/29/2024.