Starting small
No one likes stepping on toes when it comes to working in a team, and this was an area I feared I could do it most as we have to incredibly talented people working as the programmers for our team, who in all reality didn't need that much help.
However, that didn't mean I wouldn't just sit there and watch them both struggle and turn a blind eye to it, I then instead decided that the best thing to do was to help out in smaller ways, ways in which I could show a smaller prototype for something that had been designed but was in the backlog and hand it off to both Holly and Josh, this meant i could give them a little head start on something that they still had to do.
Gesture Based Combat
The first of which I tackled was the idea of gesture based combat attacks an idea that we had a while back and that we were given during feedback presentations was to have some of the magic be casted via gestures. So I wanted to make a start for the programming team in this idea and see how far I could get before I handed it over to them.
The above video is what I had gotten to before I handed it off to Josh. I had created it so that when the player did this slamming gesture and they were somewhere vaguely close to the ground an ice spike would erupt from the ground and damage enemies, This was then taken on by Josh and polished into something even better. The video of which will be below.
Here we see that Josh took my concept and pushed it further, I was so happy with the result and extremely happy that I could help out the programming team with something like this as it took a bit of stress away from them.
Interactable Torches
Followed closely in development was something that i developed fully by myself which didnt have a large impact on gameplay but it did lead to some cool ideas for level design and how we could experiment with it.
The idea I had in my head at the time was that we could have some nice darkened sequences where the player has to rely on a torch in order to navigate the environment, and while entirely experimental and just something that didn't necessarily need to be added i felt that it would be something we should use more.
Golem Boulder Projectile and AOE Pool Attack
Lastly something I had a hand in for the programming side of things was Holly's boss fight, We had discussed together a few ideas for some of the attacks that the final boss of the game could perform and one of the ideas was that of a giant ice boulder that when it landed on the ground would create an Area of Effect damage pool that the player would take ticking damage in if they stood in it.
So while Holly was programming the A.I for the boss I went off to see if I couldn't make a start on the boulder projectile for her so she could just implement it into the A.I as soon as it was ready. I used an out of house particle effect for both the boulder and the pool so as to just save some time as we were coming to the end of development.
The actual programming side behind the projectile itself wasn't anything complex but it was enough to where Holly could implement it into the Boss fight without having to alter it too much.
While what I contributed to the programming side of things is barely worth mentioning and for a while I debated actually writing a blog going into detail about it. Both holly and Josh have done an amazing job and programmers and deserve all the credit they get within this project.
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