Welcome to Atticus Ma’s Blog
PPJ01
Atticus Ma, PPJ01
Tasks:
- Onboarding Meeting: 3 hours
Total hours: 3 hours
Positive: This week was just mostly about onboarding the Altitude team into the Momentum team, which includes me. The meeting was very informative and gave me a good look on what the goals of the Momentum are. There was also another meeting right after for the programamers where the Momentum programmers explained to the Altitude programmers how their game worked. Overall, the onboarding process went very smoothly and gave us Altitude people a good understanding of what Momentum should be.
Negative: Only negative I had was that I could not attend the entirety of the programmers’ meeting. Luckily it is recorded and I can watch it later to catch up.
Upcoming: I look forward to my first task on programming.
PPJ02
Atticus Ma, PPJ02
Tasks:
- Meeting with Michael: 1/2 hour
- Reviewing code: 1 1/2 hours
Total hours: 2 1/2 hours
Positive: The meeting with Michael was very informative since we are working together on a ticket. He showed me at what scripts to look at and helped me understand how everything works. Besides the meeting, I took some time to look at all the scripts for Momentum to help get a better grasp of what to do for my ticket.
Negative: Family matters unfortunately appeared out of no where and I had to miss our group meeting. I am a little behind as of now and need to catch up with the rest of the group.
Upcoming: This week I look forward to working on the current ticket I have on Trello and work on fixing the sliding mechanic. Hopefully there aren’t anymore random events that prevent me from attending the meetings.
PPJ03
Atticus Ma, PPJ03
Tasks:
- Refactoring code for sliding mechanic: 4 hours
- Debugging slide mechanic: 2 hours
Total hours: 6 hours
Positive: Unlike last week, I was able to accomplish my ticket on time and learned a lot from the experience. Most of the programming was partner programming with Michael and we were able to compare each others’ ideas and figure out the best solution for refactoring the slide mechanic. It is basically polished and needs a little more bug testing before we merge it into the actual game. I was also happy that I could attend all the meetings that my group held.
Negative: Only negatives were that our programming usually had to be near night time which was a bit of annoying due to family matters and overall scheduling.
Upcoming: This week I look forward to working on refactoring the abilities hopefully since we changed our gameplay loop. Due to the new gameplay loop, some of the abilities seem a little too over powered and might need a bit of adjustment.
PPJ04
Atticus Ma, PPJ04
Tasks:
- Made attacking into an ability: 4 hours
- Helping show all the tiles the player will move on, not only sliding tiles: 1 hour
Total hours: 5 hours
Positive: It was nice that Michael and I were able to complete our tasks together before the new build was released. We did not have to worry about doing anything last minute and merging our branches with the development branch did not present any conflicts. More specifically about our tasks, switching the attacking mechanic from movement to an ability was easier than we thought it would be since we already had all the functionality for attacking ready to be used and separate from our other code. As for showing all the tiles the player would move on (not only showing the sliding tiles), this task was just a little tricky since the main problem was how to highlight all the hexes the player would move on for every decision they would make. In all, this week went well for me and I am glad I got my tickets done on time.
Negative: The only downside for this week was that I could only meet on the weekends to work on the tickets since I was busy with work on the weekdays. Some meetings were also cancelled which was unfortunate.
Upcoming: This week I look forward to working on reworking some of the abilities we have currently and maybe adding new ones to the game. The ability boost might need some reworking so that might be something I will be working in the future.
PPJ05
Atticus Ma, PPJ05
Tasks:
- Fixed bug where crashing was not working properly: 3 hours
- Fixed bug where player could not move at end of turn: 2 hours
Total hours: 5 hours
Positive: This week went smoother than expected. We were able to fix the crash bug and end of turn bug presented in last week’s live playtesting. The bugs were fixed with relative ease and merge conflicts were not occurent.
Negative: Finding the bugs were pretty hard when compared to actually fixing them. It took us almost 2 hours just to find why the crash bug was present and it was resolved with only a couple lines of code. We definitely need to optimize our code better in order to avoid problems like this in the future.
Upcoming: This week will probably be implemting abilities or fixing abilities. More specifically, I will probably be helping fix the bounce ability to show the tiles the player will move on and making the ability itself easier to use.
PPJ06
Atticus Ma, PPJ06
Tasks:
- Working on refactoring highlighting script: 3 hours
Total hours: 3 hours
Positive: Little bit of a light week for me this time around. I am starting to understand the code for highlighting hexes a little better and starting to develop a solid plan for fixing the highlighting. Implementing a check for the hex if an enemy is on it and currently figuring out a way to also highlight the hexes the player will slide on.
Negative: Tasks were not delegated until Friday which was a no one’s fault but I couldn’t really start working since my weekend was booked unfortunately. The script for highlighting hexes is also a little outdated compared to all the other scripts that were being updated such as abilities and movement. This is a little bit of a roadblock for me but I should be able to complete this by this week.
Upcoming: Working on fixing the highlighting script since it is a top priority.
PPJ07
Atticus Ma, PPJ07
Tasks:
- Created momentum requirements for abilities: 4 hours
- Meeting for discussing slides in the sell pitch: 1 hour
Total hours: 5 hours
Positive: This week went well for the most part. I worked on making momentum requirements for the abilities, essentially making abilities only be able to activate after the player has reached a certain amount of momentum. I also implemented functionality for abiities to be only activated once per turn. Besides development in the actual game, I also worked on my slide (viability) for the sell pitch. Alex and I discussed some things on what should be said for my slide and we decided that the viability of our game depends on expansion as well as completing our core game as soon as possible.
Negative: Only negative this week was that our group leader was out for the weekend so there was not a meeting for us. Fortunately, everyone knew what they had to do and were able to complete their tasks.
Upcoming: Going to be working on finding and fixing any bugs that come up with the abilities.
PPJ08
Atticus Ma, PPJ08
Tasks:
- Fixed bugs with abilities - 4 hours
Total hours: 4 hours
Positive: This week was a little lighter than usual. Top priority was to get the abilites working properly since when I first added restrictions to the abilities, there was a bug that if the player just clicked on an ability it would be counted as using it and put it on cooldown. After fixing that, abilities now work properly even if the player clicks on an ability and decides not to use it.
Negative: Fixing whirlwind blade ability was a little weird and took up some time. The only way to properly check if whirlwind blade was used is if any enemies actually got hit from the ability. The player could accidentally use the ability without even knowing it since we had no true indication if it was used. I got over this problem by looking through our code and finding out that there is a list that grabs all enemies around the player which was really nice.
Upcoming: These final weeks are probably going to be focused on polishing up the game. I will probably still be working on the ability side of things but I could also be hopping around helping the other programmers on the team.
PPJ09
Atticus Ma, PPJ09
Tasks:
- Implemented abilities to have an amount of uses - 3 hours
- Sell pitch - 1 hour
Total hours: 4 hours
Positive: I worked on making abilities have a set amount of uses before being deactivated. I had to add a new attribute to the ability base class so that all abilities could have their own different amount of uses. Also fixed a bug with angled attack being able to be used infinitely. For the sell pitch, I revised it based on comments from the last sell pitch and prepared ahead of time a script for my slide.
Negative: There were no meetings this time around since it was mostly bug fixing. I think a meeting would have been nice though just to see where everyone is at.
Upcoming: Final week for working on the project is coming up so I plan to just help polish up anything that needs to be polished. Probably going to be focusing on anything that is wrong with the abilities and helping out where ever needs help.
PPJ10
Atticus Ma, PPJ10
Tasks:
- Bug fixing: 1 1/2 hours
Total hours: 1 1/2 hours
Positive: Bug fixing was generally easy for this week. There was a bug where the player could not slide through more than one enemy if the enemies were on adjacent hexes with one another. A simple change from an if to a while statement to consistently check for enemies wrapped up the bug fix pretty well and quick.
Negative: Only negative for me was that I couldn’t attend our usual Saturday meetings, so to compensate I met up with Alex for a 1 on 1 session.
Upcoming: Last thing to go is basically the last sales pitch. Crossing my fingers that the team executes the pitch flawelessly.
Post Mortem
Overall, I was a bit skeptical at first when joining a completely new team on a game I never worked on. In the beginning everything was a little rough for me since I wasn’t sure how all the coding worked for Momentum. As the weeks went on though, I met great people from the Momentum team who helped guide me on completing my tickets every week and I even learned a couple tricks from them as well. It was a good learning experience for me to work with new people as well as working on things out of my comfort zone. The best part about Momentum was probably getting to program the abilities and implementing new things such as momentum requirements to them. Getting to see everyone’s work merge together was also a great site to view as long as there weren’t any Github merging problems. Overall, working on Momentum was a great learning experience and I am happy with what the team has developed together.