Warrior of Whimsy

A whimsical third-person fantasy game based around tactical melee combat.

My Contributions:
User Interface Programmer - Created all user interfaces, their assets, and save game management systems in Unity using C#. This included a main menu, pause menu, in-game HUD, persistent save game slots, and the end credits.

Challenges and Solutions:
As my programming part of the project was smaller this time around, I was able to step more into the role of helping support others through reviewing code, creating the Starfall Canyon level, and all the gameplay mechanics therein, and creating the crystal shard system where the player has to collect a crystal shard in every level to open the door to the final boss. I helped optimize multiple scenes, when we realized they were wildly hard on the player's computer.
The main challenge we faced in this project was having too many team members and no one leader... again; for the skill level of everyone involved, having 6 developers to program a game in a single month meant having to share specific roles like environmental programmer, which lead to clashes over how systems should get built, not enough work to go around, and no real quality control which lead to massive differences in quality between features and levels. Our team ran into this before while working on ThreadRipper, and we knew this would be an issue going in, so we tried to mitigate this through not doubling up programmers on anything vital to second to second gameplay like UI, the player, and the enemy AI, which absolutely helped mitigate some issues.
However, we also learned that when programmers of a certain skill level get together without oversight, there will always be issues with merge conflicts, accidentally overwriting each other's work, poorly written systems, and a lot of technical debt that has to be cleaned up later on, and that isn't solvable through purely siloing developers into their regions with free domain. We needed leaders, and smaller teams, until we all got better at our jobs, and that's exactly what we put in place for every project going forward at Full Sail.