This week I created more obstacle sets and randomization for the gifts. The coins(gift boxes) are placed to look more random to improve playability and enjoyability. I also have been working on creating a UI to indicate number of gift boxes collected – like a scoring system. This is important because this will be a metric used to measure player’s performance over time to ultimately measure playability of the game.

Later this week I found a serious bug in the game where switching between the lanes is dependent on the internal game time. In the early stage of the development I had decided to do this way because the character needed a motion to switch between the lanes (or else the character will be instantly teleporting). The distance the player moves is a velocity x time function where the time is the game time. However it turns out that the game time is also related to the game delay or lag in the game, so with longer delay, the player might move more or less than the desired distance. This results in player landing on the different position then expected, making the game unplayable.

This bug is of highest priority, because it affects playability of the game, so I will prioritize this bug over any additional features that is planned to be implemented.

Over next week I will be fixing this bug, and finishing up on the scoring UI. After that point the game is basically ready for the MVP. A measurement tool to measure the game latency will need to be implemented at this point.

Because I am facing unexpected error in the game development I am slightly behind the schedule, but we had planned for such unexpected causes in our slack days. So our slack days will be consumed to finish up on the necessary implementations. However because we have been doing frequent integration tests along the way, we are fairly confident that this integration will also work without too much problem.