Delta Time
Design Director, Gameplay Programmer, & Co Producer
Custom Engine | Sept 2017 - April 2018
Delta time was a 2 semester game project.
It originally began as an all programmer team of 6 where we came together to make a game about rewinding time to beat platformer type levels.
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Halfway through development, the team size almost tripled inside where we gained an art team and a sound designer and we moved from having a pixel art game of cubes to what we ended up with.
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My contributions
Co-Led & Organized a team of 15 people using Scrum and Trello to meet deadlines.
Ran bi-weekly one-on-ones to diffuse stress caused by setbacks and to retarget priorities.
Implemented a Timeline Manager to record, filter, and rewind time for the game objects and events.
Implemented an Object Factory to easily instantiate game entities in the engine.
Implemented a Parallax System to handle the backgrounds.
Designed and implemented multiple levels using our editor.
Assisted in creation of particles for the player abilities
Implemented player abilities such as dashing.
Kept documentation of the game's design goals for the design and tech teams to better communicate.
Conducted competitive research to help shape our game's design.
Lots of debugging
What went wrong...
...and what I wish I had known.
We never accounted for the team to grow as much as it did:
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The core issue here was that having never worked with artists before we weren't fully prepared to support them.
We didn't have tools in place for them to report bugs, navigate the system, or add their work to the game directly and by the time we began working on them we were nearing the end of the project.
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With the knowledge I have now I feel the correct thing to do would have been accounting for the possibility of growth and have made a decision early whether we wanted an art team or not. This would have prevented all the setbacks and issues that arose with being unprepared to receive them.
We generated a lot of code debt:
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After the first semester, we now had made the scope of our game bigger having a much bigger team. We began working on all the new systems without making sure the old framework could support the new team.
Overall this caused the have to fall behind schedule to continuously try to update and fix obsolete systems.
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Looking back, the right call would have been to archive the problem systems and build them anew accounting for all the new things the engine had to support.
Rather than the long painful grind we dealt with, it would have been better to sacrifice a smaller amount of time to build a more robust framework.
We ran out of time:
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This was, in part due to the problems mentioned above and in part to us mismanaging our time. Overall this meant that to get the game to be done by the deadline we had to sacrifice polish.
As the design director, I should have cut features to deliver a more polished, immersive experience, rather than one that followed the original prototype but had no time to finish.