As I work through my final semester, there has been a lot to do for the big final project of the senior capstone. Early on so far through these initial weeks has been essentially our mini pre-production phase, developing and preparing for the remainder of the semester. Over the course of this blog I want to discuss what this process has been like so far, what I have worked on and done, and how this phase of development has been overall.
Team Goals
I think our primary team goals for this pre-production phase of the development process has been onboarding people on to the team and preparing for new game changes going into the alpha and beta stages. As someone who was onboarded during pre-production, I think that it went mostly fine. There have been communication issues across the team that are decently significant and could cause problems down the line, but I hope that they will be solved as we start to specialize and focus on the work more. Ideally we hope to diversify the game experience more and place the focus on exploration, which I believe is mostly accomplishable although definitely limited in size by the hard deadline of early May.
My Work
As for my part on the team, there has been a decent amount so far that has been done. Some of this work has been programming related and some has not, but I think that diversity is probably for the better because it made me feel like I have been helping out in some more unique ways. To start, I have tried to help with some of the team organization since that has felt somewhat lacking by making google sheets for feedback from various professors and testing sessions, along with a programmer bug tracking list.
(above is a screenshot of the bug tracking google sheet)
My goal with the creation of these google sheets was to try and create a more sustainable structure that we could maintain and develop over the course of this semester of game development. Through the color coding and the descriptions of the bugs, we can easily see what has been done and what still needs to be fixed, along with a priority list to determine order of importance. It is a simple quick process that helps us pretty easily stay on top of the bugs within the game.
Programming wise, there have been a few different projects that I have worked on over the course of these initial four or five weeks. My main two focuses have been on developing some basic tools for plants and the plant modifiers within the game, along with working on a temperature and biome system. For the plant tools, I wanted to try and develop the plant scripts into a more refined script that allows designers to edit and create plants very easily without having to go into the actual code. This was to accomplish a more manageable game in the future that we can build upon well.
(above is a screenshot of the plant tool unity interface when put on to an object)
As for the temperature mechanic, the main goal was to make a biome system that could track the different objects within said biome, and apply various temperature impacts if necessary. This primarily applies to any plants that would be grown within the zone, but could be expanded to impact other objects as well, such as the player. Specifically for the plants, the impact from the temperature would be on the water levels and growth levels of those plants. Certain biomes may have beneficial or detrimental impacts on the ability to grow plants there, and in the future we could diversify this impact even farther by having certain types of plants have different levels of impact from each biome. It could be too ambitious for the time left in the project so it may end up scrapped, but I have been working to prepare it if necessary.
Overall State of Pre-Production
To attempt to summarize my pre-production experience as concisely as possible, I would say that it went decently, although with definite room for improvement in some areas of the team. Specifically I think that our organization and communication have been lacking over the course of these first few weeks, but they should hopefully be easy to solve. Part of this may very well be resulting from the fact that none of us have ever worked on a team this big (14 people) before, and I think there were always going to be some levels of adjustment pains associated with that. Even if the organization and communication can do better, and I will outline some ideas I have for that below, it is still good experience for us to go through this process and to see what to expect from managing and working on a team of a larger size like this.
So what could we do to solve these issues? At risk of stating the obvious, the best way to solve these issues would be to create more meetings between disciplines that can help to foster more clarity on any of the important topics in our game such as the temperature or new plant types or other things. We also could solve organization in one of two ways, I believe. We could either really double down on our current strategy of google drive organization and overhaul that, or we could take our documentation and other information and move it to Pineapple, our repo and wiki site that usually holds that information during these projects. Personally I think the Pineapple option is probably better, since it is what we should be doing for this project anyways to have everything in a centralized location and it could help us get a fresh start on the organizational process and make everything easier for our professor to find as well.
Comments