Semester two has come to a close and a big congratulation belongs to team Zephyr. Their vertical slice dominated the vertical slice presentation. That's not to say that my own team, team M.E.A.T. did not meet expectations, simply that we got beat out. After talking it over with others on my team we've decided that we could either lick our wounds or we fight harder to raise the bar. We elected the latter.
This semester has been a whirlwind of excitement. From the beginning more has been asked of us than ever before. While some management decisions resulted in about a month of lost programming hours on our team, it did result in a well thought-out programming architecture and heavily researched approach. It also exposed us to new ways to think as a result to the classes of FIEA. While some of the programmers think it was a month lost, I can't help but wonder if our architecture (which has resulted in much praise on our own behalf and amazing results later in the game) would have been as well planned out. I dare say it would not have been, and our development time would have been littered with game-stopping delays.
I owe it to Sean McVey to say that he's done a wonderful job modding the scene designer to work with the terrain manager which was designed for the game. Although in retrospect we have identified this decision as one of the bigger mistakes of our team. We invested a huge amount of time into the terrain system on all ends, and we have been receiving feedback that “the artists could have done it better”. While this is usually the case, and probably is the case in this particular instance we wanted to free the artists of the level design burden and give that to the producers where it belongs. Doing the terrain programmatically also allowed us more control of terrain at the programming level and simplified our path-finding algorithms. I suspect that our post mortem at the end of the project will rip to shreds the time spent on the terrain manager, and in a future project of this scale it might elect to have the artists work more closely with the designers to generate levels. Although with our current solution if we decide to have more than the proposed two maps our producers will be in a good position to crank out a ton of them.
I'd also like to do a shout out to the other programmers on my team (Paul Watkins and our Lead Billy Bramer). It has been an incredibly stressful semester and it helps to have a support line of like-minded individuals. It is even better when you've developed what will prove to be lifelong friendships with the guys you've spent a year of your life "In the trenches" with. Stressful or not I'd like to believe we've all grown, and that in the end the semester was successful and well worth the effort expended. If even one of us dropped the ball, I would be writing a very different post mortem.
As a team, as a whole, the necessary comraderie has been missing to produce the best possible game. A lot of blame was flying around at the end of the presentation and I think we all owe it to ourselves to take a step back and ask the question if we are treating the other team members the way they should be treated. I know that I have managed to subconsciously treat some individuals less than they deserve, and I intend on working on that over the next semester.
I also think we as a team need to reflect on ourselves and verify that we gave everything we could to our project, our team and retrospectively to our education. Speaking for myself, I can happily (although somewhat wearily) state that I have given it my all.
Lastly, just because I have to give a warning to all other future FIEA programming students; Dr. Gourlay is not half as scary as he appears to be, but his assignments are ten times as vicious. Stick to it, don't fall behind, and by the end you'll be proud of what you accomplished.
