Working on Mechasaurus Mayhem was an incredibly fun experience and an informative project to work on that allowed me to evolve my ability to code. When we first met to think up plans for the game, it was fun and exciting to bring our ideas to the table and felt natural and intriguing once we formed our foundations. Because of the planning that we made in the early stages, this project felt like it was coming along in a non-stressful way and encouraged new ideas to sometimes be implemented without a sweat.

My role in the game making process involved making the weapon swapping system, weapon pickup system and the additions of animations to some of the guns and weapon pickups. When I first began working on the weapon swapping system back in game jam 3 for what this game originally was, Zip-Zap Dinosaurs, my lack of much dynamic data structure experience brought me to hard-code everything which forced many dependencies to arise in the code. When we were renewing our ideas for the game, I was encouraged by my teammates to figure out a more dynamic structure which would make all of our lives much easier. In the end, I was able to make a dynamic system that worked alongside a large state machine, yet was much easier to figure out. Working on the hitscan weapons was fun to do as well and was very rewarding once they worked. The balancing on the weapon damage was toyed with multiple times until we came to the final product but was fun to do all the same. I was also forced to learn more about how raycasting worked in Unity and helped me figure out issues that arose and helped fuel ideas for raycasting in general which helped greatly. Animations and particle effects were new things for me as well, yet was fun once I learned how to do it and helped the player have better feedback when shooting certain weapons or picking them up which allowed for a better game experience overall. I was also tasked with coming up with the design for the final level which I had two ideas for. One was a level that was very similar to the styles of the other levels, but my second design was one that the group felt would be an interesting implementation, so we picked that one. 

When the final days of the project were coming up, it became a sort of shift into lots of game testing and we didn’t have as much time to fully balance everything to its greatest potential, but we were able to pull through in a pretty amazing way in the end. We fixed bugs and made design changes at pretty quick speeds which allowed the game to come to its current state. From the way that the dinosaurs worked with their AI to the feedback from shooting them which turned them red were all really cool additions that I felt came out amazing.

I highly enjoyed working with this group of talented people and will never forget all of the incredible stuff we’ve been able to create since we first met in the beginning of the Game Development I course. I feel I’ve been able to grow to be a better programmer and teamplayer due to the constant support and encouragement from everyone in the group which allowed this to be one of the proudest projects I’ve ever been a part of. From the great leadership, intense coding implementations from all of the members, impeccable AI, and the incredible art and assets we were able to use, I felt this game to be something I genuinely feel proud to have worked on and can’t wait to continue my journey into game development in the future.