Background
This project had an interesting and rocky start as it was made by Confused Tortoise Studios (a team) that was reformed halfway through the academic year. Meaning while other groups had a whole year to work on their game, we only had half the time (6 months) to achieve the same feat. Having said that, our team met tight schedules and deadlines which we worked hard to catch up and meet.
Our team (being self directed) worked hard and managed to catch up with the other teams towards the end and amazingly even manage to be placed as rank 3 in our cohort.
Our team consisted of 6 members, we had:
- 2 programmers (including me)
- 2 artists
- 1 UI/SFX Specialist
- 1 Designer/Audio Designer
Personal Contribution
As mentioned previously in the summary, this project was a whole new experience for me as I was primarily focusing on programming instead of the usual designing and being a producer like I did for my previous projects. This really allowed me to improve and learn a lot in my programming skills and allowed me to have a chance to showcase my programming knowledge.
I was the UI programmer and also programmed other general things which I will cover in-depth later on.
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UI Programming
When I was first transferred over into this team, the first thing I started working on was the main menu UI for the game. This was because the assets were ready to be used and I was comfortable with programming UI as I have experience with them from the previous projects.
The option UI for our game with a fill in animation
Throughout the project, I worked closely with our UI artist to discuss on what is possible, what's not, what can be improve, what needs to be changed and such. This allowed the UI to be quickly iterated and changed so that it fit nicely with our game and was aesthetically pleasing.
SFX Implementation
I also worked closely with the SFX artist ( same person as the UI artist ) in implementing the SFX correctly as intended into the game,
making sure that the particle effects are working as intended. While this may seem simple, many SFX was used in various different situation, meaning that different SFX have to be implemented in numerous different ways for many different objects.
An example of 2 very different particle which is used in 2 different ways
General Programming
I was also in charge of the general programming and bug fixing in this project. So implementation of the QTE sequence, subtitles for voice lines, and other general interaction codes are all programmed by me with the help of my other programmer.
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A few example of the interaction codes are the keycard doors, environmental based voice lines, the charged shot (secondary attack)
and the fixing of the grinder in level 3.
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Bug fixing was also mostly done by me and I found it a good experience as it helps me to improve on my problem solving skills by working back and finding what causes the bug but also made me understand the importance of clean coding as it can help the project in the long run by preventing bugs from happening and also make bug fixing simpler.
Tutorial text
I did not have any experience with tutorial text so this took awhile for me to figure out how I wanted to do it.
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But the basics of the tutorial is that it have a function to fade in and fade out the instructions and that you can only advance the game through the player's input or by hitting a hitbox.
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Some sections of the tutorial will trigger a voice line or an animation to play.