Thomas Jackson - Coder Postmortem

At the start of this project, Owen and I took responsibility for programming the two player characters. I took the Wizard (player 1), and he took the Warrior (player 2). Our scope included a base attack for each character and then three special abilities that the players can pick between after defeating each wave of enemies. For the Wizard, the base attack was a fireball spell that caused splash damage. 

The special abilities included:

• A timed landmine that damages enemies in a wider radius
• A cloaking ability that allows the player to hide from the enemies
• A homing attack that instantly kills the nearest enemy to the player

Some of my other responsibilities included:

• Making a sprint function for the Wizard
• Adding cool-downs to all the abilities
• Finding and implementing sound effects and force feedback for the spells
• Programming death and respawn functionality for the Wizard
• Tying the Wizard's health to it's specific player HUD
• Creating a main menu for the game

The Kanban board our team made for this project shows only 6 hours of work for me, but I ended up putting in around 30 hours. A lot of that extra time was expected, as pieces of my code became outdated when someone else worked on the HUD or the enemy blueprints. I also spent around 3 hours playtesting various builds of the game to see not only if my code worked but if it led to a fun play experience. There was also some unexpected work that I took up because we didn't have a specific person for it, such as the main menu and respawn HUD. 

I found the largest hurdle of this project in the natural disjointedness that arises from building up everything at the same time. I would make the Wizard's attacks able to damage a version of the enemy blueprint, but then had to completely delete that code and use a different function when a more fleshed out version of the enemy blueprint was made. In future projects I plan to focus more on internal functionality for my potion of the project, waiting until another portion is ready to build connections between them. Adding force feedback, sound effects, and Niagara systems to the abilities to get them to a level of full aesthetic completion while waiting for the opportunity to make their code complete.

I'm proud to say that my team met the vision we originally had for this game project. We knew from the start that our scope had to be manageable, and I believe relegating the players to four abilities and the enemies to two types successfully kept us from feature creep. I am quite proud of how complete this project feels, especially my player character. The ability set allows for varied playstyles and strategies and all the spells feel smooth to use. 

Blueprints:

         Wizard Character

       https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/-e9ij16h/

        Fireball

        https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/npfolhnc/

        Lightning Landmine

        https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/h9n4315z/

        Homing Swarm

       https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/q936x-np/