Howdy!

My name's Owen Corey and I was a programmer on this project. My main contributions were to the player manager and interaction interface, though I did help out a bit with the save system, particularly when it came to saving unlocks. 

Player Manager:

Without a doubt a majority of my time was dedicated to working with the player manager. It includes player health and mutation, damage and healing functions, loading and saving for the game mode, death and respawning, and HUD updates. Looking back on it, I'd ideally have turned most of the functions into actor components to make the whole system more modular and easier for others to work on in parallel, but it is completely functional as is. 

Interaction:

I created and implemented the interaction interface on the player, as well as put together the interactable highlight system with the help of Dameron. Basically, the player gets all the interactables in front of it and focuses on the one closest to the center of the camera, highlighting that interactable with an arrow pointing at it. Deceptively simple, I think it adds a lot of character to the game and helps players to locate interactables in an otherwise unassuming environment.

Saving Unlocks:

Within the save system, I added the logic to save and load unlockable abilities used by the player. I had initially tried to handle it through a game instance but given that we already had most of the save system built into the game mode it seemed best to just leave everything where it was.

Lessons Learned:

The biggest mistake by far is how centralized everything is on the player manager. I lost track completely of how many times people had to check in with the entire group to see who was working on it before they could begin to work on their task, delaying development by sometimes up to days. This became increasingly evident when we were nearing the end of development and were focusing on bug fixes. The solution to this issue was obvious from the beginning in that we should've been using more actor components. The interactable highlight component came late into development during a time when the player controller and manager were in high demand, so we made it into a component that plugged into the character seamlessly. In the future I will prioritize on keeping everything as modular as possible, so we do not run into an issue like this again. 

Other than that, though, despite our many issues with the game, I can't think of a better group of programmers to work with. Everyone was extremely helpful and understanding of each other and I think we had a good thing going for us. I can only hope that I'll get the chance to work with you all again sometime in the future.