Week of Setup

Voidsinger

This week has been spent preparing the underlying mechanics for Voidsinger. I also spent much time organizing the team and training the new people. The mechanics that I worked on were the build grid and base ship. I also helped with the creation of the physics system.

Build Grid

Training

The majority of the people on my team had never used Unreal before or had any coding experience so I spent time teaching them the basics of Unreal, Blueprint, and Widgets as well as the basics of object-oriented code.

Team Management

As the team leader and head designer and visionary of Voidsinger, I needed to distribute tasks among the team members as well as ensure that they understand the design of the game. Distributing tasks was difficult due to the poor team composition as well as the complexity of mechanics. Three of the four of the other team members had never coded before so I couldn't assign them tasks relating to one of the many complex mechanics required as a foundation for the less complex mechanics. I worked around the problem by working closely with the other experienced programmers in our free time in order to quickly establish skeleton functionality so that the others could get to work. Also while we were working on that I assigned the new people to the UI since that was the only thing not reliant on the building and physics systems.

Another problem I ran into was that one of the team members was confused as to the direction of the game as well as how they were supposed to contribute. Because of this, I called a team meeting during which we discussed the direction of the game as well as set up a new design doc to better manage the design of the game. Afterward, I had a one on one conversation with the confused team members to ensure that they knew where the game was going and what they needed to do.