Project Length
12 weeks
Roles
Lead Programmer, Designer, PO
Team Size
9
What I Learned
I came up with the original concept for the game, including the weapon types and their effects. This was also the first project where I was the creative lead, and was able to assemble my own team. I was able to work together with the designers to make levels and design other aspects of the game, on top of my programming duties. As for programming, I learnt a lot about developing multiplayer games and began getting better at modular code.
We set up a MSCW and set up the plans for a vertical slice for the game, with the possibility of future scaling. This helped scope the game realistically so that we could deliver everything we wanted.
Challenges
Since Mini Gungolf started out as a tech demo, turned into a passion project, turned into a real project with a proper team, the main challenges were remnants of old things still being used. As the solo programmer for the entire project, I was in a hurry to keep implementing all of the features we needed and had little time to go back and iterate and work on compability.
There are some issues such as there being three different player controllers. This was because they needed different things, but if I had more time to set it up I would make them all inherit from the same base class with differences. The tutorial player needs the ability to lock/unlock specific weapons whereas the multiplayer controller needs ownership checks and such. In reality, maybe the multiplayer player could do with the ability to lock weapons for custom gamemodes or the singleplayer one could use it for special challenge levels. This would improve scalability and modularity.