What got done:
- Adjusted take damage function so that towers and blessings don’t reset OOC timer (1 hr)
- Finally made game manager static singleton to simplify code (1 hr)
- Asset implementation (1 hr)
- Playtesting (3 hrs)
- Total (6 hrs)
What went well:
- Good design discussions with Mark, Joseph, and Michael about plans for development and feature adjustment should we continue work at EGS
What didn’t:
- Assignments from other classes all piled up and sucked up almost all of my time this week so I didn’t really get much done
Upcoming:
- Trying to weed out the last few bugs we can prior to the showcase
Personal Postmortem
This term was a lot rougher than last. Even with the difficulties that I had at the beginning of the term with adjusting to my leadership role, there was always a strong sense of hope and ambition I had. I don’t know exactly what happened but this term I just felt exhausted, and it caused a multitude of problems. Namely, I just had a very difficult time pulling myself together to get my own work done for the project, and small pesky bugs would put me off for days at a time sometimes. Additionally, I felt like I sort of lost track of what the team was doing frequently. My communication with the team was not great, and I did not do a good job of encouraging communication among the members as much as I did last term and it made the environment a lot heavier. Lastly, I somewhat failed at having more regular meetings with the team to do work like we did in the first term. Progress was still made, and we still stayed in touch, but I feel like something was lost in not regularly seeing everyone and spending some time doing work with company, and having some fun doing it.
There may have just been a lot of talk about personal failures and issues I had, but there were still a number of successes. Chief among these was that I did a much better job at entertaining design discussions and ideas that I might have considered somewhat out of left field beforehand, as well as taking these ideas into account and implementing some of them. On the other hand, from a programming perspective, my knowledge of game development best practices has definitely improved. As much of a pain as it was to rewrite as much code as I did, I think that I was able to greatly improve the performance of the game as well as the readability and re-usability of our code base in doing so. While I may have struggled a little bit with certain aspects of leadership, I think I was largely able to transition to handling a larger team more effectively than I had previously thought I would. With as many people as we had, I had to improve at being comfortable being hands-off with certain things and trusting that my team would do their work well, and I think I was able to do that.
Overall, I am happy with the product that we have put together, and hope to continue working on it in some capacity, maybe even publishing it at some point, because I have seen a number of people really enjoy playing it, and I want to bring that enjoyment to more people.
Pharaoh Hound Games 