Corwin Belser | PPJ Week 9: Postmortem

WEEKLY NARRATIVE

This week was the continuation of implementing "nice-to-have" features, and getting some placeholder removed. Our QA build worked very well for allowing us time to test and fix any urgent bugs before Monday.

POSTMORTEM

This was my first time taking on a lead role by choice and not by need, and it was overwhelmingly different than I was expecting. In the past I would take charge to make decisions, but not take on the other managerial tasks associated with the role.  This project was different...in a good way.

I feel I did well as a programming lead.  It took a long time to get a system in place.  The first few weeks I was giving myself all of the tasks, as I didn't know the skills of my team or what they could handle.  I've become a lot more comfortable delegating work and feeling confident that it will get done.

One area I don't think worked was the workflow from design to implementation.  It took many weeks to get from where we were, with designers being vague about how things should work, and creating designs with behavior that didn't exist.  I came in expecting requirement doc-level details, and it took compromise from both sides to get us in a better spot.  I still feel that too much is being delayed until implementation, such as playing a design and finding problems, but I'm happy with how far we've come.

Lastly, I don't like the game we made.  I'm not into stealth games, so from the start I knew this wouldn't be something I'd enjoy playing.  I tried to put some focus towards making the abilities and enemies the programmers worked on modular enough that they could be used in other games.  In the end I created more work for the programmers, but I hope to see some of the cool things we made reused in the future

CONTENT WITH HOURS

• Meetings (2 hours)
• Builds of game (2 hours)
• Code to remove old save files if no longer compatible (1 hour)
• Brought remodeled Rem into the game (6 hours)
• Helping Mike troubleshoot Maya->Unity rig issues
• Screenie changes: (3 hours)
• Screenie now moves slower, but speeds up when chasing the player (1 hour)
• Screenie's vision light now matches the color of the gif on its screen (1 hour)
• Screenie no longer interacts with the memento (1 hour)
• Removed all nests from the game (1 hour)
• Memento changes: (3 hours)
• Player can no longer drop the memento (1 hour)
• Memento falls with gravity if not held (1 hour)
• Memento teleports to the player on death (1 hour)
• Bug Fixes: (7.5 hour)
• Enemies in second scanner challenge scaled x100 (1.5 hours)
• Scanner enemie's snapping neck fixes (2 hours)
• Scanner's vision detection was happening from its feet instead of its eye (2 hours)
• Memento couldn't be picked up after dashing through a wall (1 hour)
• xRay power fixes: (1 hour)
• Scenes had wrong prefab (.5 hours)
• xRay portal was not placing (.5 hours)
• Code Review (2 hours)

POSITIVE OUTCOMES

• We're getting a level of polish to the game
• We finally have the remodeled Rem

NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

• Programming is getting tasks done before our deadlines, but other departments aren't starting until the deadline has passed. I have to stay up late waiting to do a build, or do the build without art changes

NEXT TASKS

• Continue swapping placeholder for modeled assets
• Find more areas that can be polished up
• Options menu

TOTAL HOURS LOGGED THIS WEEK: 27.5