What are your thoughts about the Project?

I was definitely impressed with myself that I was able to keep up with all the work despite of my health as well as my lack of experience with Unreal Engine. This project really helped me to understand blueprints way better than the first two projects. Don't get me wrong, those projects were also great at teaching me the basics of blueprinting and how to code in unreal engine, but this twin stick group project really built my foundations to it. I finally understood how concepts and logic works in blueprint and I was even able to code on my own without getting help from peers or my instructor (except for this one time that I had a struggle with the spawn emitters). I definitely would say that I drastically improved a lot over this last few weeks and I think that the project would have been more improved if we had more time as we have a lot of ideas to implement and I am happy that I have a team that is composed of driven and talented individuals! I could not ask for a better team.

What was your role in the group?

I am proud to say that I am in charge with documentation and I have been documenting our meetings since day 1. I am also responsible for coding game mechanics like the teleportation mechanic and the keycard system (which I am really proud of). I am also responsible for the UI at the beginning of the game as well as the other UIs that were used such as the enemy counter, hidden key counter and the keycard UI.

I can also say that I am also one of the people who are mainly responsible to keep the group together. If ever that nobody wants to lead and speak up, I take my initiative and offer my help in order for our team to progress.

I also keep the group in check with deadlines, bugs that I found within the game(you could say that I am also responsible for quality assurance) and many more.

What have you learned during the experience?

First of all, I am able to code in blueprint on my own. I may struggle at times but I finally understood the concepts of blueprinting and I can definitely utilize the functions that were taught in previous lessons. I also found out the website for the UE documentation so it really helped me through this process. If I would compare it with the previous twin stick project, I think I'm learning more of unreal now than the before. This is because the previous project is just me watching the instructor create the blueprints rather than me actually learning the definitions and functions within the game development software.

What were your most memorable part of the development process?

I can definitely say that my most memorable part of the game development process was the part that I was able to implement all of my desired and main implementations. The first implementation that I refined was the teleportation system which I designed on my own. I am also very proud of the keycard system that can be able to detect whether the user has the key or not. It was not an easy process but I sure did learn and enjoy it!

What are the struggles you faced during the development process?

Like in my previous project, I find debugging to be the most hectic and time consuming part of the process. I would spend hours and hours trying to fix a certain bug from an implementation that needs certain requirements such as the blueprint that detects if all enemies are destroyed in the level. It was not fun to experience multiple crashes from unreal as well as there was one time that I was editing my blueprint and unreal crashed on me and broke my entire project, good thing Perforce backed me up and I was able to get back on my feet after that. The issue that annoys me the most asides from the crashing is that every once in a while, you will not be able to use the right mouse button or any of the menu as it automatically closes upon click and I have to restart Unreal every time this happens. This was a problem that I have encountered a lot and I thought it was just me who was experiencing this but turns out my whole team has experienced it as well (most of the time it was my fellow programmer, Garret).

What part of the project are you most proud of?

I am most proud of my blueprints, specially the teleportation that surrounds Louis' map which is the reactor core map. As you can see, the reactor core map does not have an extra doorway that would open once you defeated all the enemies. It would be to step on the teleporter directly. In order to do this, I had to reverse engineer my fully functional blueprint code and prayed to God that I won't break anything. I was able to do it in a day and I feel so proud of myself, I didn't even ask Kyle for help this time!

In what aspects do you think your game could be lacking and what can be done to improve?

I do think that the gameplay mechanics needs more fixing such as the keycard system and the power-ups. Sometimes the bots can be really overwhelming and I think, a good level design class would be able to teach us how to better implement enemies across the map. I also think that I need to learn more about Unreal as I am still not as good as my partner for this project and I feel really down when I can't help him.