Team Lead and Programming Postmortem

Team Lead

What went right?

That's a tough question and at this moment in time I'm finding it hard to answer. We did manage to keep it together enough to put together an actual game. Well, the tutorial level and the first level. Were they missing certain tidbits to make them complete and polished? Undoubtedly yes. There were quite a number of things that I would have liked to see go into the levels to make them complete but due to time constraints and uh, well let's not sugar coat the situation, team abilities, these items simply were out of reach. Regardless of that we did make something that interested people in the industry. I heard lots of things, both good and bad, fly out of the mouths of the portfolio reviewers at Interfaces and one thing that held constant across the board of reviewers was: "I'd like to get a copy of Time Blunders when it's done." That's pretty impressive.

What went wrong?

I wonder if there is a limit to post length... In the interest of science I'll keep this short. I had a very hard time convincing people that Tuesday at 6pm did not mean Thursday at 3am. I'm not sure if this was due to a lack of ambition, lack of care toward my and Tom's time and sanity, well mostly Tom because he puts up with that crap, or an actual overworked team. I heard a lot of "I didn't have time", or "I had to work on other projects". What's funny is I had a lot of the same classes as everyone else and I heard the same excuses in the other classes from the same people. I guess this begs the question "If you didn't have time for Time Blunders or capstone, or senior project, what were you spending time on?" I think this has to due with the lack of being able to fire someone. Early on in project 2 it was made clear that there was no longer the ability to fire anyone and everyone was going to pass regardless since it's so hard to fail this class. I won't try to sound like I did 100% of my workload 100% of the time. But that was one week and I paid for that time off with double work duty the next week.

Programming

What went right?

Lots. I feel that we accomplished so much in the programming aspect of Time Blunders. This is by far the most complicated scripting I've ever had to work with and I'm proud of how Tom and I built the scripts. I learned so much about the magic of keeping code dynamic that I think it's opened new doors (as corny as that sounds) for me. I've got a nasty habit of hard coding things which makes it very difficult to interact with the code later. Working so closely with Tom and reading page upon page at http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash taught me a fairly large amount in a relatively short time.

What went wrong?

The biggest thing that sticks out in my mind is the velocity. Both a huge achievement and the bane of my existence all wrapped up in a Ram's Horn signature Saucy Burrito. At first it seemed to make the game more believable and smooth. It sort of created another dynamic to the game. Unfortunately it almost broke the raptors jumping mechanic, or at least increased it's difficulty ten fold. By the time we decided that we wanted to take it out it had already weaved in and out of the code so deeply that it was almost impossible to take out. We would have had to rewrite the animation system, jump system, climbing system, etc. This is another example of code not being dynamic enough. In a perfect world I would have just had to remove an add velocity function but I ignorantly took the hard coding route and made it much more difficult that it needed to be.