Demolition Express

Demolition Express is a game developed by a team of MSU students on a team of 8, although it actually has a little bit more history than that. Originally, the concept was created by a team of 4 programmers as a vertical slice prototype. From here, it was added to and pitched for full development by a new team of 3, creating a huge art update. Upon getting the green light, Demolition Express was launched into full development over the course of a semester. When it came time to choose team roles, I ended up becoming the team producer because of my position as the only one who stuck with this game through all 3 cycles of development, leading to the creation of the current Demolition Express. 

As this was the first time I have been a team leader on a project like this and of this scale, producing was an uphill battle. Not only was onboarding 7 new team members onto an existing project hard, but an unfortunate change in version control software also caused many issues early in development. Even so, I continued to grow as a producer and settled things out as the year went on. Learning the best ways and amounts to people manage, how to support my team, and how to best manage my time between roles was frankly an amazing experience I would never change. Despite currently aiming for software development roles, I think that this experience helped and will continue to help me in any role just by helping me be being the best team member and person I can. 

As for the programming work I did, originally I created the UI for the game as well as the only ability for our character at the time, which was time slow. In addition to this, I did audio implementation for the game at this stage. During the second iteration, I worked to further flesh out the abilities, adding a dash, as well as adding an unlimited more to the game where you could destroy as much as you want. Going into the full development, since I ended up taking on a lot of producer duties I shifted to be primarily a UI programmer, as well as just a general programmer. Unfortunately, a lot of the earlier systems weren't made perfectly to interact with each other, so on the general programming side, I did a lot of debugging as I meshed all the systems into one cohesive game. Other than this, I did a fair bit of work on the backend of things. First of all, I implemented a bug-reported system provided by the professor and linked it to all our major events. This data was sent to a Google Doc and analyzed by our team. The other backend project I undertook ended up being a lot more useful though, which was visual telemetry. While the professor also created the base for this, it was only set up to follow one object within one scene, but after a little tweaking, I had it good to go and working between than ever. This allowed up to see the playback of every crew type when they shot their rocket, where the rocket went, and when they blew it up. This visual representation of a player's actions helped a ton to determine where blind spots were in our map, or if players were doing unforeseen actions.