AUTO-More | ronaldvan

AUTo

Development Background

Joined the team in the second half of its development time.
Hired by the team to cover a spot that was left by their teammate who moved on from the school.
Wanted to do more designer specific roles but a lot of tasks fell on trying to polish the game's engine for better playability.
The team had lots of issues with older code that contributed in refactoring the physics engine but ultimately just stuck with the old code at the end of development.
There was suppose to be enemies in the game but it never made it in because the old physics code didn't support one of the enemy's key trait.

Challenges

When getting on the team, I wanted to be more of the designer in the team but with the unexpected departure of one of the previous member, I had to continue his work that was unfinished.
Most of the work that the past member left behind had very little comments to help me understand what the system was doing so I had to take some time to understand what was going on.
The physics system wasn't easy to work with throughout the last parts of the game's development since it combined all of collision and physics in one file with all functions.
Hadn't used Git before joining the team so I had to figure out how to work with it in command line rather than a third-party software.
Also didn't work with lua and json in previous projects so I had to figure out those editors as well for the game when making the enemies.
Without the physics in the game being properly utilized, I had to make the enemies without the physics in mind.

Lessons Learned

Learned the basics of using Git, lua, and json throughout the development of the game.
When getting on a team that's halfway in their development, I should've read the code more thoroughly and commented the code to help myself understand faster so the development didn't slow.
Always ask for help when you don't know how to do certain things that is not easy to understand.
Don't stick all the needed things that are core together in one file with functions deeply ingrained with the other system parts.
Look ahead to what you are working on so it doesn't end up getting cut from the main game.