PFD Week 4: Hell's Champion Initial Development

"Hell's Champion Initial Development"

This is the 4th blog in the series where I actively talk about the progress I'm making on my chosen professional skill titled, "Game Development through Team Collaboration".

This week will go over the initial development in-engine for Hell's Champion.

Beginning in-engine development

Last week, the GDD was developed to a point where the team could transition into developing in-engine prototypes. 

Beginning in-engine development, I developed an initial player controller that was pre-discussed in a meeting with the entire team.

(Video Demo of Player Controller)

Once the player controller was developed, I posted a demonstration to the team along with a brief description and how the team can modify it themselves.

(Posting the demonstration with details)

Following the post, I received insightful feedback that helped me understand what I've developed from a new perspective. This allowed me to reflect upon the development of the feature, and understand potential issues that could arise. Firstly, the feature did require some tweaking, reflecting allowed me to realise some bugs and issues that I swiftly resolved. It allowed me to understand that I need to consistently look back upon previous developments, ensuring the utmost stability to be able to scale the project efficiently. Secondly, after joining a call with some of the team, I realised that I could be encroaching on a previous issue that I reflected upon being an iterative loop. I was given critical feedback to ensure that I don't sink too much time into the feature and creating a large amount of iterations as this was something that caused critical problems within the previous project's development (Tides of the Moon).

Once feedback was received, changes were made and reflections were realised, I moved onto another feature. The reason for deciding to move on instead of polishing what I'd previously developed was that I was more specialised towards programming, so I could be more specialised by continuously programming while allowing peers to tweak the settings of the player controller, and report bugs to me if necessary.

I decided to develop a basic deck-building system with some functional UI as it was a pivotal feature in the game and iterations needed to begin as soon as possible. I created a basic UI menu to allow a coded system for equipping abilities, as well as designing the system to allow my peers to easily add abilities into the game, without needing to hardcode it.

(Video Demo of Ability Deck-Builder)

(⚠️ - This video has audio narration)

Once again, I posted this to the team for feedback.

No significant issues were raised and I generally received very positive reactions to the feature. For context, the "cinema" emoji conveys the opinion, "very good".

Although I appreciated the positive reaction, I did crave other valuable feedback so I followed up with a point about the feature to try and initiate a discussion. As so, my peer nicknamed, "JurgenWithWings" made a suggestion for a sub-feature being the sorting system. I appreciated the suggestion and let them know that I would work on this in the future.

(Feedback to the Deck-Builder Demonstration)

(Replying to the suggestion)

Although I had an active suggestion to work on, I decided to move onto a third feature for the day as I had already planned to develop this, and I believe it was justified as I could add the sorting system in the near future afterwards.

I moved onto developing a central "Game Manager" script that would host all of the project's settings, economic variables and progression values. I once again posted this to the team for feedback (none was received).

(Posting the script to the team)

Although no feedback was received on the script, suggestions were made on how a certain aspect of the script functioned, something that gave me valuable insight.

(Discussion around an aspect of the script)

These features were the significant contributions made this week. I would like to state that hours were spent discussing, planning, and designing features all week which is what allowed so much realised progress in the span of a couple of days. Further responses and feedback were received which I appreciated and responded to when necessary.

(Further responses)

Reflection

Reflecting on the activities of this week, it's clear to me now how crucial the cycle of development, feedback and iteration truly is. By integrating frequent team discussions, I ensured a collaborative atmosphere, which enhanced both the quality of the work produced and my understanding of each feature's importance within the overall project scope. A key takeaway was balancing the time spent between iteration and progression to prevent falling into a repetitive loop of minor adjustments. The proactive approach to communication not only improved my professional collaboration skills but also significantly advanced the project's pace. Moving forward, I will continue prioritising regular reflection and iterative feedback to maintain efficient and sustainable progress. In fact, as noted on the Agile Alliance website, a balanced approach to agile practices and disciplined iteration is key to achieving superior project outcomes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this week marked substantial progress in the initial development phase, focusing on key gameplay features and system setups. The value of structured feedback and collaboration was clearly demonstrated and will guide future development practices. I look forward to carrying this approach into next week's tasks, ensuring consistency, quality, and efficient teamwork.

References

Agile Alliance (n.d.) What is Agile? Available at: https://www.agilealliance.org/agile101/ (Accessed: 23 February 2025).