My Experience
I think this subject has been the one where I've learned the most in the 3 years I've been studying videogame development. Not only have I learned about the ins and outs of an animation system and gameplay programming, but also how to communicate inside a big team (specially with other departments), to trust in my teammates and to (try) and keep calm when everything seemed impossible.
The best part of the project was being able to work with people who I didn't really know and bonding with them, now I pretty much know the work ethic of everyone and I think I've made pretty good friendships. The worst part was the weekends before deadlines (they were always on Mondays) were most of the times some features didn't make it but we couldn't implement them because there was a freeze.
Animation System
Before coming into this project all of us had explored a deeper field of engine programming and each of us were tasked to implement it into our CulverinEngine. For me and Daniel López López that field was the Animation System. We followed the model of animations in unity; albeit a bit more simple as rudimentary as we lacked graphical tools such as nodes and graphs. We pretty much continued working on our animation system all throughout the project, adding new features when needed and fixing bugs.
In short, my work in this department has been:
- Import animations from .dae files
- Component animation
- Animation Clips
- Blending between animations
- Animation State Machine
- Spawn prefabs through animations
- Scripting methods for our animation component
Gameplay Programming
After implementing the animation system I was put into the "player" scrum, where as a programmer my task was to implement the choices of our designers regarding the three main playable characters. As we were three programmers and there were three playable characters, each of one of us took care of one of them.
Later on we moved into the "combat" scrum, which now included the enemies and we had to make sure the combat between characters and enemies was how the designers wanted, and most importantly, fun.
While being a gameplay programmer I performed the following tasks:
- Rotating between characters
- Player death
- Shield Guard Rework
- Enemies UI
- Daenerys left attack (Fire Breath) and right attack (Fire Wall)
- Secondary Abilities placement and aiming
- Healing Fountains
