After we came back from GDC, it was back to the Co-Signers. The first thing we did was discuss about the future of the game and which engine we should use. I had asked a lot of industry professionals about our choice of a game engine and how much it would matter to them when picking people for jobs. The big AAA companies did not appear to care about which game engines we were working on. They wanted to see solid C++ skills and awesome demos of techniques. Also, we had got a lot of feedback about our game at GDC. Finally we all settled with Unity as the Game Engine and finalized the game mechanics.
The engineers on the team including myself had a really tough time juggling between graphics, engineering and co-signers assignments. It was the beginning of long nights which will end only on the May 2nd.
We all decided on tasks for each sprint and discussed among ourselves the best techniques to do the said tasks. It was an awesome experience where the whole team was working as a well oiled and cohesive unit. Everyone was upbeat about the game and their respective tasks.
My tasks for the first sprint was to implement a view detection system between guards and point man. We discussed many techniques for doing this. Nikhil suggested we use the perception sensing algorithm for the same and I thought it was an awesome idea. But ultimately it was decided that we would go forward with a simple detection system for the sprint and then work on top of it after EAE day. I implemented the detection system and it works great for the prototype.
For the next sprint, I worked on hacker ping system. I had to manage the ping inventory and create the ping system. If the hacker pings the point man, the position information is transmitted to the point man over the network and it shows up on the point man side. AB did the ping mechanism for the point man side. I worked with Max to set up the network calls.
For the final sprint, I worked on IR nodes and its implementation. I created an IR system which checks for guard positions with respect to activated IR nodes and relays the position to the hacker's screen.
Finally in the last few days before the EAE day, we all got together and combined our code. It was a long and hard process where a lot of bugs and code merging happened, but came out on top in the end.
We showcased our game at EAE day and it ran fine. We got awesome feedback again from many people.
The main feedback were about the initial learning curve and point man's sense of responsibility and the hacker's sense of urgency. The team will be concentrating on solving it during the summer.
Finally the team got together and discussed about how we are going to the development of the game during the summer. It seems most people are in town during the duration and are willing to work on the game. Looking forward to the new challenges.
