I have been working on adding more features to ShakeMatch, the latest are the UI and the powerup button. On UI, I added the Start menu, Settings and a Pause screen:
The powerup is a fun one, and where the lesson learned comes in. My original design for the powerup is this:
- Accumulate 10 points on matches to activate the powerup button
- When the button is pressed, find the sprite with the fewest instances and the one with the most instances
- Destroy the sprites with the fewest amount and replace them with the sprite type with the most instances (this is so it is easier to complete even larger matches)
I also wanted to add audio effects and music, but point 2 above was a lot more complex than I estimated, so Game Developer me had to meet with Product Manager me to find out what was most important and how we could meet our minimum viable product by the end of the sprint. The scope change was this:
- Accumulate 10 points on matches to activate the powerup button
- When the button is pressed, find the sprite with the fewest instances only
- Destroy those sprites and randomly generate new sprites of any type (this is not as powerful a power up but does provide a place to grow from)
- Include these changes in the backlog
- Finish the UI
- Push audio effects and music out to a later sprint
The changes for this sprint ended up being on a specific task, I modified the name of the task and added subtasks to account for the missed complexity:
On to further programming!