#exosense

Check this hottie.

You Can (Not) Return

Level Design

Mechanics

Mechanics Pt.2

Testing

Theme & Mood

Getting there

Another time perhaps

World Building

BRICK

“EASY”

Time is short

Cont

Maybe I’m cursed to break things

Package

Coming in late to the team, my main role was to assist in programming and fill in any other gaps that may exist. The most apparent gap was the lack of merging of ideas from different members. This was most evident in the varying theme and feel of our game from member to member. By sitting down with the team, we were able to finalize on a theme of a serious issue, presented in a light-hearted manner. Another example would be the lack of cooperation between the level, the puzzle, and the players. Although we did not have much time to solve this, I did manage to come up with, and implement partly, a two player puzzle for level 2.

Whew. This semester has, in a lot of ways, seemed like the biggest one I’ve done yet. The fact that’s it’s ending is making me a little emotional, actually. But I’ll keep my full reflection for a little later (either late this week or, like, later today).

Anyway, this is what happened during this semester’s final week.

On Monday, I started by trying to clean up our Bitbucket repository - Mark and Garian each needed to push around 100MB worth of files, and we had about 5MB free. It turns out that we had been wasting around 600MB on starter content this whole time though, so I went and deleted the worst of that, freeing about 550 MB or so. I’d love to say that that was enough to last us our final week, but that’s not true. Anyway, I pushed the changes I’d already made and helped the others with their stuff.

On Tuesday, I stayed home and helped Mark with his programming remotely - not the greatest idea. He started to implement a lot of stuff, but it wasn’t until the day after that we really got anywhere, especially with Mark’s Sourcetree not working correctly. I wrote/finished more posts, and worked on Creative Workflows.

On Wednesday, I basically sorted out programming stuff and source control stuff for the whole day. There’s just so much stuff

On Thursday, I stayed home and mostly worked on Creative Workflows.

On Friday, I helped Mark with his stuff even more (it’s hard for the both of us to program on two separate computers, due to the nature of Unreal’s Blueprints that we’re programming with, which is why I helped him with programming more than I programmed this week) and finished off Creative Workflows.

On Sunday, I came in to finish off the game. We sorted out some finishing touches, like making sure people could see, making sure players don’t spawn three times and making sure the second level worked. (I’m only being partially facetious - we did mostly work on finishing touches.) We packaged the damn thing (well, the others did) and called it done (at least for the purpose of submission - we may have to implement a couple of changes for Open Studio).

I also wrote:

Why everything I wrote/said about releasing ExoSense publicly was either naïve or not something I wanted to commit to more than letting people do what they want

How the game’s core concept manifested in the final product, seeing as I hadn’t actually talked about that before