The Real Post Portem

Okay everyone, I'm sorry about the previous post not being complete. Now it is time for the update!

So SGP was a grueling ordeal. I learned a lot about myself and especially what I like to do when it comes to game programming. The experience also put my relationship through a lot but we are stronger from it. Anyhoos, onto the post-mortem!

What Went Right:
Whiteboards, and Too Many Cooks the Kitchen

Whiteboards were the glue of meetings. Forcing people to layout their ideas for the rest of team allowed us to tackle problems before they arised.

Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen is usually meant to be a bad thing but in our case worked into one of our greatest strengths. From the beggining, all three of us got very much into each others work. Even though each of us was only responsible for certain systems, we were all invovled in the architechture process. We got lots of crticism from other teams/staff that we were going to slow but we were able to find the connections between systems very early on and shape the architechture of each system on its interface rather then its implementation.


What Went Wrong:
Bad Planning
As a group, we all agree that our biggest mistake was taking on the task of the particle editor and puting our "unit editor" into the second month of production. This foley with this was the unit editor (along with the animation editor and map editor) was a game crucial element. We need the data it produced to test and continue refining our game design. Having this massive part of our project delayed till we only had 1-2 weeks to work with it before the final milestone put a major dent in our game.

In the end, Arena! was a ton of fun to make. Before this project, I was starting to think that Gameplay Programmer was not for me, but after actually working with a team, I realized this is right up my alley. As I coded, I saw the game come to life and that was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life (besides proposing to my fiance).

So what am I up to now? I'm working on a new Zombie Game that is actually a friggin game. Right now I am developing a Map Editor. I'm getting the Navigation Graph Editor portion working then get working on the Tile Editor portion.

Until later,
Good Night and Good Luck