Galleons of the Galaxy

A 3D arcade shooter inspired by the original arcade gameDefender built from scratch using DirectX 11 and the Flecs entity component system.

Team Lead - Managed a team of 4, assigning and managing workloads through Trello, doing code reviews before anyone's work was merged into the main branch, testing other's work and providing feedback, and handling merge conflicts whenever they arose.

Engine Programmer - My role was to build features for the engine we were creating to run the game, this included a system for reading in 3D and audio assets, saving game data, and architecting how the various gameplay systems would work together, like the physics system, the audio system, the in game camera, and some visual effects like the bomb blast all from scratch in C++.

Challenges and Solutions:
The main issues with this project was properly distributing work between team members with vastly different levels of skill in a way where everyone would be challenged to the point of learning without burning out. Our gameplay programmer was deeply resilient and wouldn't stop until he built whatever was assigned to him, because of this, he mainly only needed support with understanding the ECS and data-oriented design patterns so that he could have the tools to finish the project, and then he could knock out anything assigned to him. For our generalist programmer, he was much newer and as such had to be watched more closely, it was important to go over his code in more depth in code reviews to help him improve his style and nip problems in the bud before they could grow out of control. Lastly, our graphics programmer already had a love for graphics programming and would collaborate with other team's graphics programmers on how to improve his work, so my job was mostly to keep track of his progress and cut features when it became clear that with the one month deadline he wouldn't be able to finish them.