Teamwork
As one of my first group projects in the games industry, it was a struggle and a learning experience.
As a group we had to make sure that tasks were delegated properly so no one felt like they were doing too much or left out.
Documentation was kept up-to-date in rotation every week between a members, this had to be communicated when something urgent arose.
Finding out where the strengths lied in each member was an interesting process.
Once that was figured out, we could trust one another with their job.
That trust was built on honesty and equal excitment for the project.
One of the biggest lessons I learnt due to my mentors and teammates is patience. There were some disputes
during development regarding to hours being spent. After the mentors cleared up that it was important to understand
the workflow and make mistakes (but learn out of those mistakes) we settled things down and became a stronger team.
Contributions
During research we all came up with great ideas for a game. Winged Warfare was built upon the brainstorm I contributed a lot in.
The movement and hiding of animations (as we lacked an animator) were iterated upon and eventually I helped with the idea of robot birds.
My contributions to the project are the menus, UI, app flow, implementation of the player, the player's components, and the setup of
the AI birds with their behavior. This took me 30 hours to get down properly and allow to be built upon. During this
process I learnt a lot about Unreal Engine and what other engines have in store.
We had to upload weekly stable builds and make sure the main branch in perforce was the most up-to-date
stable version. This task fell on me and gave me a deeper understanding of other version control systems than Git.
Major lessons
As my first group project that was structurised and supposed to simulate the industry, we learnt how
to research, prototype, document, and develop. Using the right tools is important, even if you are uncomfortable with
those tools. You learn for the betterment of the game.
After lots of documentation and preparing, the development process went smoothly. This is something I lacked before this
project and start to apply to all my projects from now on.