Week 6

This week I created a sprint board so I can set milestones and deadlines to help organise my thoughts and keep me on track throughout development. If a particular task looks too big, I can easily adjust it or even cut it to avoid scope creep. 

Figure 7: A screen shot taken of my sprint task board (SANDERSON, 2025) 

In figure 7, you can see how I have started laying out the important tasks that need to be complete to get the level playable and polished before the deadline. I will be adding to this list throughout the entire project, once I have a better idea of the details needed to complete each task.

Outside of organising my project, I have finished rebuilding the stairwell from the apartment section. However, I did run into an issue with Hammer editor’s configuration, significantly slowed down my progress. I wanted to test out how the newly designed space felt to play in, but the game was only loading into Garry’s Mod instead of HL2. I tried to go into Hammer's options to change the configuration to HL2 but forgot to enter the game directory. This broke the Hammer engine and caused the level to crash whenever I attempted to play it. So, I am unable to change the configuration settings from within hammer.

While it was undoubtably frustrating to lose progress to a technical issue, I have learned not to interfere with the configuration and how time consuming the consequences can be.

Even after researching on YouTube and on various online help forums, I was unable to find a proper solution, so I made a choice to revert to an older version of the project, because I strongly felt that remaking the section again would take far less time than attempting to fix the issue on my own. Attempting to fix it on my own may not have even been possible and could have taken up excessively more time. Ultimately going through this process has taught me a valuable lesson and I will not be making the same mistake again.

Reflecting on building the stairwell, I think that I could have saved myself more time, if I focused on getting something that worked rather than something that was geometrically perfect.