The development of Albackpaca is drawing to a close, while the workload for the programmers is clearly still a prominent part of the work needed to reach a release-ready product. For the last few weeks I have worked mainly on both supporting the team members whose disciplines have not led to much interaction with Unity previously, along a number of other responsibilities - primarily bug-fixing & QA testing, with some additional small work on cleaning up UI elements, additional sound triggers and general polish work listed on the Trello board.

As a subtle polishing touch I added rumble feedback to the controller. THis is not natively supported or exposed in the input systems provided by Unity and required the inclusion of a C# .NET wrapper for XInput. A custom Unity package of such a wrapper exists and so I imported this into our project from the XInput github page. I added a mixture of coroutine and basic triggered rumbles, triggered on events such as player death, sliding, falling platforms etc.

This is, as previously mentioned, a subtle task that often goes unnoticed, but in this project I have taken a sense of enjoyment in providing ‘thankless’ functionality that gives the project a sense of what I would consider expectations rather than impressive aspects of a consumer-ready product.

In reflection on the overall project and time spent working with a large team on AGD, I have thoroughly enjoyed my own personal experience, though I know this sentiment isn’t reflected through the whole team. A mixture of imbalance in work along with naturally variance in team members work ethics lead to a mixture of some heavier input from different specialisations which ended up flowing into other areas, leading to tensions that in later weeks began to cause serious communication issues. Despite this however, I feel that all the work produced by everyone in the team has been to an extremely high and industry-ready standard almost all of the time, and while tnesions at times were high it was always apparent that grievances were put aside to work on the project.

Individually I feel that, rather than growing or improving my programming skills, I have been able to apply my specialist knowledge to a wider team and see the direct role I could eventually play as part of a games studio. I have also consolidated my skills as part of a team using the Unity engine, and became prepared for some of the potential pitfalls that can often cause hurdles in development, with a clearer understanding of how to spot such issues and deal with them.

Overall, I have enjoyed the experience of working cross-discipline and with a large team to produce a functional release-ready game prototype, and I am proud of the efforts and final product, both in my own personal role and in the teams collective high quality effort and enthusiasm throughout.