I was in the Team 3, which get the toy yo-yo. So we made a game called YoVenture, a 2D action platformer where you use a yo-yo not only for combat, but also as a tool to interact with the environment. We were inspired by the history of the yo-yo in Ancient China. You can find that the dragon in the boss level showed in the following picture is also in Chinese style.
My contribution to the project
The specific contributions are:
- Name the game
- Program the AI of all the snails
- Program the snail counter
- Program the boss level, including the AI of the dragon, motion of the fireballs, and the fight actions in the level.
- Package the program files to the excutable version
Besides these, I gave advice to our artists on the art features of Chinese style. And we programmers always work together to solve problems we met during the period.
Different things to do next time
Actually because there are three engineers in our team, and I was not familiar with the pygame before, most of the works like build the program frame of the whole project was done by Sudeep, who is more familiar with pygame. I was a bit lazy. I think if I can travel back now I’ll try to learn more of pygame and share more work with our engineers. So as in the future.
Also, as a technical artist, I may try to be an artist some time.
Things I learned from participating in this process
This is the first time I join a team and make our own games. So the experience is very precious for me to get through the process of making a game prototype.
Positive lessons:
First, as an engineer, I learned to seperate all the things we need to program and make a standard of the connection ports. Then we can work independently. We made the file versions and changes made to them clearly so that we can combine them together correctly. That’s the source control, which is the basic thing for programers to work together efficiently.
Second, we are a team, so we tried to make the team communication to be as convenient as possible. We had a shared drive folder and all the thing were uploaded into it, so that we can keep updated. We mail to each other whether there is something need to be discussed. And we talk about our project everytime the prototype class starts. Our team members are very nice too.
Third, I have to say about our artists’ excellent work. They are Tara and Kamchai. They have very good art skills, and finish all the art materials we need in time. Their passion and enthusiasm were surely a great encourage to the whole team. So I learned that being positive is very important in the project process. We all kept energetic and made out the game in our minds.
Negative lessons:
There are surely something we need to improve in the future. There are also three things I think that is most urgent to be improved. First is that we didn’t have a design document. All the works were assigned orally, and sometimes I actually do not know what’s the next step. We need to make goals. Second, we uploaded all the files to the drive, but didn’t classify them very well, that we always needed to ask where to find a specific file. Third is that we are always hungry before one o’clock when the class ends.