OilAndCorditeDX

Well, the end has finally arrived.  What Went Right: I got to work on some incredibly interesting concepts and apply them both creatively and fundamentally. Taking a more creative approach to some of our common problems, such as the procedural clouds or fake-volumetric laser was an awesome experience that resulted in some pretty interesting results. Additionally, tackling the website from a programming perspective was a very enjoyable task. Even though, it has some hiccups on some user's computers due to caching issues.Finally, I felt that as a team, we worked very well. There was definitely some communication issues throughout, but I felt that it was very easy to bounce ideas and feedback off each other.   What Went Wrong: This semester was a little rough. I was pulled far away from home for a pretty big chunk of the semester, so it was difficult to find time to devote to the project. This lead to some late nights the night before, and some missed classes throughout the semes...

 General:  It's done, finally. The game and the term is complete. Overall I'm very happy with where we landed. There we're a ton of challenges and many sleepless nights, but at the end of it all I am genuinely proud of what we all made. In this last week the main things I worked on were: Tutorial redesigning the tutorial rewriting the text and sprucing up the UI panel Level 4 adding in the destructible generators making changes to the current destruction script and setting up a different variant to work on the checkpoints Level 5 Getting the laser up and running (Peter and Sean are to thank for the creation of that) Ironing out some bugs and finishing the final stage New Particles Smog sea ignition effects New Ship thruster (blue plume behind ship) tons of help from peter on the implementation of this Music Choosing and implementing music for the Tutorial, 2, 4, 5. Setting up bounds for the levels making changes to player controller to add bounds setting the bounds for all ...

  Personal Postmortem Things that went right: I was able to explore more and new technologies that I didn’t get to the last term, like making music using FL Studio. It was refreshing and cool to work on other things besides just programming in Unity. I got to learn more about mesh particles and destructible objects. I also got more experience with Unity. I attended most meetings and learned how to work with a large group. It was cool to be part of something larger and see how a large group operates. Things that went wrong: I usually started things too late. I should’ve started tasks earlier instead of doing things on the second to last or last day before class. Communication. I should’ve talked with my team more and discussed certain aspects that I didn’t understand. This would’ve helped greatly in areas that I struggled with on the project. Hardware. I did not have a controller to test. I only have used PC for game development and play. I did not have much experience with console ...

Things that went right: I got to do what I love: Making 3D models of sci-fi stuff. Having more artists on the team this quarter allowed us to divide and conquer, working on multiple levels at once and getting a lot more done each week. Meetings were a lot more talkative with the increased team size, and we had lots of discussion and feedback regarding our plans each week. Things that went wrong: We had some communication issues early in the project, resulting in overlapping or incomplete work since we didn't fully understand what each member was working on in some of the earlier weeks. Though we got our work done earlier in the week than last quarter, we still had a tendency to make last minute patches and updates just before class. I personally didn't communicate as well with level designers as I should've; I sometimes pushed model and texture updates to scenes without notifying anyone, only for them to be discovered later. This never caused any real problems, just some oc...

  The Good: Leadership We had a solid leadership structure this term. I felt like I could really lean on the other leaders for support/help and likewise provide that support. It felt like there was a much stronger structure as we got past the first few weeks of the term.  Scope Having the additional team members meant that we were really able to expand the scope of the game. After we figured out the number of levels and built a few out it started to feel like a real game. We still ran into issues, and there were still cuts, but the majority of those cuts were due to stalls, not scope shrinking.   The Product I genuinely like the game. There are issues, as with any project, but I would be happy to show this game  The Bad: Communication It was extremely difficult to maintain communication with people throughout the week. Outside of a few people that spent time in chat it was impossible to know the status of work being done. This often led to early morning submissi...

Things that went right: I got a lot of good work done on the UI, both in game and in the menus. Most of the code from last term held up and was a good foundation for what was done this term. This meant many of the changes to gameplay systems were easy so I generally didn't have to spend too long with those tasks thanks to good architecture. I think I did a decent job in many of the meetings I was in of guiding the discussion topics to what was important, as well as getting my ideas and opinions across. Things that went wrong: Near the end of the project and on days that I was really busy my code quality definitely dropped a bit. There were several weeks where I don't think the tasks were clear enough to several members of the programming team, which lead to tasks being done incorrectly or not being done at all. Sometimes I either started too late or I took too long polishing certain features so I didn't finish all my tasks by Tuesday (although I always made sure to get done...