This blog post covers both the first and the second sprints of the 495 fall 2025 semester. These last two sprints were unfortunately pretty light; however, they were integral for getting everything set up and ready to hit the ground running in sprint three! Sprint one and two were there to get the project set up and communicate with the team I will be working with during the semester. Key points of this sprint was contacting the designer/producer of Kickback, formulating a outline for the project, and researching the current code-base of Kickback.

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First, I had to make sure that the team I was reaching out to wanted the opportunity to allow me to work alongside them with my master's project. Once given the green light I needed to make an outline and review their current code-base for potential ways I can hook up to their project. This mostly involves looking for data that could be useful to document when the user is playing the game. Examples include health, score, or anything that can be a quantifiable way of looking at player performance.

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The main outline for this project defines the tentative schedule for the project and when I presume I will be done with various parts of the main project. The whole project will span around three semesters with each semester taking up a large portion of a part of the project. The current schedule lists that the main data collection methods will be finished the first semester. The data collection and analysis will be happening during the second semester. Finally, the research paper outlining the findings will be finished in the third and last semester. There may be some updates to this depending on issues within the pipeline, especially if I have to go back on my hypothesis if rejected.

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A lot of these past two sprints went to ideas of how to structure my own code for the project as this is different than anything I have done before. My current idea for how to get this project started would be to use a lot of reflection code alongside static functions to hookup to the code-base. This allows me to have very loose coupling with Kickback's code allowing for more dynamic code that won't break if things are changed during development.

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I have also brainstormed various ways of storing the data within the outline and code-base research. I first started with just saving things as JSON; however, JSON is great for data storage but not for data that will be uploaded and analyzed. I eventually thought of storing data in CSV format which allows me to link it to an Excel sheet which supports CSV natively. The data at its current state will include a few things. One of those being a GUID as an identifier for data which allows me to track data without having to store user credentials which can be quite problematic for privacy reasons. Another is the date of the data which will allow me to track performance across an entire play session. The last part of the data will include all performance metrics if applicable.

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Overall, these sprints were slow, but for very good reason. I don't want to just start working on this project without a significant game-plan in place first. Doing so may lead to major setbacks in the future that will delay the final project and thus the data collection and paper that follows. I hope that with this solid pre-production I can get a good deal ahead in the next coming sprints! Thanks for reading!