Conclusions:
There were a lot of things that went well during this project. Creating the art such as the sprite and the falling blocks were relatively quick and easy, as well as the movement of the sprite, controlled by tapping. Some initial difficulties were coding the random falling movement of the blocks. The team ran into some bugs as coding this frequently caused the blocks to disappear randomly along with blocking the ability to move the sprite. However, this was overcome by working on the one issue for the majority of a class period. However, one portion of the code that the team was worried about was the collisions, but this went very smoothly as the collision code was written in one line. The start menu along with the four different screens overall was coded relatively easily, with minor errors to overcome here and there.
Recommendations:
If there was more time to create the product, the team would have added some additional features, such as adding more falling blocks to dodge, an acceleration factor, and some more artwork such as a stylized menu, a trail, and some music. There are some minor issues with collisions, such as for some unknown reason, sometimes if the block collides with the sprite, the game will not end and will continue, whereas other times the collision will end the game. With more time, the team would be able to resolve this issue, however within the time period, the game is 100% playable, but not perfect. Another recommendation would be to better follow the plan, and to stick with one idea the entire time. The team went back and forth on ideas sometimes, and ultimately it slowed us down a bit. Here is the daily plan along with what was accomplished on the days:
Goals for Day 1:
- Algorithm with some pseudocode:
Accomplished Day 1:
- Algorithm with some pseudocode:
Goals for Day 2:
- Finish movement
- Create sprite
- Create three objects
Accomplished Day 3:
- Created sprite
- Created two objects
- Finished movement
Goals for Day 3:
- Create moving cubes
- Collisions
- All stats
Accomplished Day 3:
- Began coding home screen
- Did not complete collisions or movement (ran into a movement bug that took hours to figure out)
Goals for Day 4:
- All user interface
- Collisions
- Finish screens
Accomplished Day 4:
- Movement
- Collisions
- Finished home screen
- Worked on other screens, but did not finish
Outside of class Day 4:
- Finish product marketing and software documentation portion
- Flyer for product marketing
- Coding without testing different screens
Goal for Day 5:
- Debug
- Complete different screens, allowing the user to go back to menu
Accomplished Day 5:
- Finished product