Pedro Dominguez - Programmer

What did I learn?

For this project I was a part of the programming team and worked on the skills the player would acquire while playing the game. One big thing I learn during this project was how the different departments work within the timeline of development. While working in the programming team I learned how important and connected programming is to the other department but also learned how disconnected it can be. At the beginning of the project it very much felt like our team was racing to have things built and programmed for the first checkpoint's play test. At the first checkpoint it really only felt like programming had work to be shown on a test demo map. This wasn't because the other teams hadn't been working or had work to show off but rather because how programming is the real foundation to the project. So while the first half of the project was really fast for us once we had things built it slowed down when testing while the other teams started to pick up speed and get things like the enemy and levels into the game. That give and take flow of how the different teams work together was a really new and interesting perspective I did not have before starting the project.

What was the most surprising part of this project?

The most surprising part of the project was learning how truly chaotic it can be working with a large group of people on a single project. Before I had really only work on projects alone or in a small group but this time we had over 20 people working on the project. This lead to a lot new experiences that I had not dealt with before. Like having to coordinate with others in different departments was something I was not used to. With this learning the importance of communication was key in working on the project. This kind of project was not one where you could just do you work and keep to yourself. You needed to communicate with others, understand the direction of the game, and be accountable for what you need to get done. If these things are not meet than one person can really slow the project down. Big projects are truly a team effort.

What do you consider your greatest achievement during this project to be?

My greatest achievement was learning and developing a system that detects the angle of collision. Originally I planned to develop the riot shield skill has a physical object that the player would deploy to block incoming objects. After testing this system it lead to some interesting and bad outcomes when playing the game. So I went back to the drawing board and thought how I can make somethings that still blocks damage without being a physical object in the game. This lead me down a path of developing the system that reads the angle two objects collide at. Surprising enough I had to use Trigonometry when developing my new system. This new system would detect the angle and give out a true or false Boolean variable based on if the collision fell within a certain angle. Once the system of developed everything else for the shield fell into place as I could use that true or false to communicate with other systems like health or the dash skill.