Final Reflections

The Semester and What I Have Learned

The Cut -

I like to start things at the end, and here will be no different. I am currently on the team Little Lizard Studio after my team Midnight Sprites was cut. I will be working on a game visualizer for the remainder of the year as their AI and Gameplay programmer (possibly also the lead programmer but we will see). As such I will reflect on what happened, and what I learned from this experience in a hope to better prepare myself to move forward.

Team Dynamics -

I think this is where most of the issues and reasons why my team didn't move on. Not because we were toxic, but because we were good enough friends that when concerns came up we didn't address them and chose to ignore them. I think this was where most of our issues cropped up.

The Designer stopped working with me at meetings with me and we didn't meet up as much as I would have liked do to his work.

The Artist never hands me any artwork with dimensions in powers of two or keep a super consistent size of sprite scale.

The Producer doesn't make it clear how he is setting up our backlog.

All of this should have been brought up by me but I didn't, I tried to make it work since I didn't want to be too off putting. Similarly I did things that other people never brought up, like slow animation implementation, lack of thorough commenting, ETC.

This lead to a lot of tension and frustration that boiled over while I was at MIGS and it was definitely the wrong way to handle workings as a group.

How To Fix -

Better and HONEST communication. I think the honest part is where we screwed up, we did a lot of communication, but it ended up not helping because we were failing to accurately communicate the issue. This, I think is an issue of America as a whole at this point, and it's good that I am learning how to fix that issue for myself.

What I Did and Learned -

Lets start at networking:

I started it too late, didn't prioritize it high enough and didn't know all the risks to it. I did eventually get all the framework ready to go, but in the end it would have taken too long to make everything networked properly, and have a fully complete game. I prioritized the game, but of course it wasn't as complete as it could have been.

The sprite layering system:

I am pretty proud of this actually, it works damn near perfectly. It is similar to other things other people have made, but every other system was usually either flat with no angled sprites, or extremely slow gameplay. I learned how to use the sprite system of unity in and out, and the rendering systems of Unity 2018.3 as a whole.

Modular Spells:

This could have been useful if we had gone through, and I learned a lot and solidified knowledge I had of inheritance, but overall it should have been saved for the next semester.

Unity Inputs:

They are awful, like my god who made coded this system, they should be fired. It required me to use rewired as a intermediary instead of just using the built in unity functionality. on the plus side I know where and what to avoid.

How To Improve -

Taking everything that I have learned from this semester I think I need to work on three things.

1. General Improvement: As with every semester I think one of the things i could do is just be a better and learn more as a programmer.

2. Make Better Documentation: I need to make more and better documentation for my artists and designers so they can get a better glimpse at what I am doing and maybe a better understanding of what it is I do.

3. Time Management & Prioritization: I didn't focus on the right things during the semester, I focused on Networking far too late, and made a system far too early. I need to better plan out my tasks in the future to make sure I complete the correct things on time.