Makers Week 11: The Beginning of the End
Tags: makers, unreal, tdd
Published: 2020-02-09 20:48:05

Weakly Goal:

*Can you use high-quality processes to build an extended project in a team?*

The next two weeks are the big ones we get to start our final projects. I was put into the games team which I'm very happy with cause I'll have a lot of fun with it. Anyway, let's start talking about the final project.

Day 1

So most of day one was spent planning. We had to decide what we were going to do, what technologies we wanted to use and how to split up the work. Our idea is to make a turn-based battle game with a free roam feature. We looked into the two most popular game engines Unity and Unreal Engine, after looking into them we realised that Unreal Engine was better suited to the TDD process so we decided to use Unreal Engine. Finally, for how we'd split up work we decided to go with mainly pairing and independent research as well as mobbing occasionally. We had to have some independent research mainly because it was a new language that we all needed to be used to. We also had to get an MVP done for Wednesday, which we decided would be just the battle part of the game.

Day 2

On the second day, we got to work on our project we started in pairs but we had to spike the first couple of features and then go back and test them. We did this mainly cause we couldn't test something we didn't know how to write any code. We managed to get most of the features done but the main point was to get a handle on how Unreal Engine works. So at the end of the day, we were only missing the end game feature, but we were going to add a different result in the completed product so it wasn't too much of a problem.

Day 3

We started Wednesday off with our MVP review. It went well we had a functioning MVP that we could then easily build of and it was also tested so we were very happy. We also got started on what would happen after the battle so basically adding finishing touches to our MVP. The last thing we did was add camera functions like zooming or adjusting the angle of the camera.

Day 4

We managed to get the battle consequences done while the other team started work on the level design. But we ran into a problem when merging we had merge conflicts but because we were running our code in the Unreal Engine editor we couldn’t solve them normally. After some research, we were able to solve the conflicts in GitHub desktop which is a useful thing to know because I'm sure we'll run into more merge conflicts.

Day 5

We got into some more complicated features on day five. We got to add status effects which will give an advantage based on the element used. We’re also going to implement a random chance of these status effects occurring. We'll also add a same type debuff so if you use an ice move on an ice monster it'll do less damage. We managed to get them started but I'm also going to work on them over the weekend. The rest of the group our going to be working on level design.

Summary

This week has been extremely challenging but also rewarding seeing the game come together is always reassuring. I'm very confident we'll have a well-tested functional game by the end of next week and that our showcase will be awesome but most importantly I'm having fun with the project and my group so I'm looking forward to next week.