Especially when looking back towards the past time marches on ever forward. We started off as a rag tag group who’s shard commitment to the project was, “eh, seemed cool” to a band of memers and dreamers with big ideas, to a bunch of dung beetles thoroughly crushed by the weight of those ideas. In the end though I guess you could say that we resurrected as guardians of a project that we nurtured, wanted to protect, and see grow up well.
The only thing I can really say that I learned in this project is that I still have a lot to learn and that I will never stop learning, not just from a technical standpoint but from a life view too. I did not commit nearly enough to this project as I could have due to a variety of factors such illness, other projects conflicting and the occasion moments of choosing to play games rather than try and fix one. Problems like that will never go away permanently but at the very least having to deal with them has increased my ability to minimize the time lost that I could have spent on my project.
Then there was of course the issues that arose from coding on the same project with multiple other people at the same exact time. We lost scenes, prefabs, and just in general hours and hours of work due to either our own incompetence or failures on the software we were using. But after encountering those issues we were able to manage our work better, make sure no one was changing the same thing in the scene at the same time, keep our code up to date before we shared our changes with each other, and other general management so that issues lie this that kept popping up in the early weeks didn’t show up again for the rest of the project.
The final issue that I think is worth mentioning is the corners I may have cut in writing some of the code I developed. There are some parts that are questionable in terms of generally if they want to expand on it or even to bug test it. Fortunately most of the systems are set up well enough that things should not be impossible to change if needed.
There are so many more things to be happy about than upset about in this project fortunately. First would be that the some of the systems I set up are actually done well so that they are not too much of a pain to mess with if needed and that for some parts it is easy enough to read and understand. At the very least I am proud about how I set up our grid system so it did not involve searching through a massive array in order to figure out which player could use which tiles.
There’s also the fact that our game turned out at the very least enjoyable. It’s far from perfect but the systems we threw in there, units, towers, and blessings and how they all interact bring out choices that are at least kind of meaningful and engaging. People in play tests seemed to have some fun playing the game and that was all I could ask out of this experience.
Finally, I’m glad to have a team that I could send gifs to and get gifs back in return. There were crunch times where we all set ourselves on fire to fix any problems in the last minutes and the only thing keeping those fires burning were the memes and plain jokes we all shot at each other.
My future is getting a tube that’s supposed to represent my diploma and entering the work force but,(assuming that our project moves forward) if my team needs me I will be ready at the call to explain any stupid code I wrote or fix any dumb bugs I caused.
Pharaoh Hound Games 