This week felt like my most productive week yet. I was always barely making the 12 hour quota and felt like I never had enough to do but I managed to go over it and get some meaningful stuff done. I finally got my hands into the scripts themselves and it was a bit overwhelming but I met with Andrew and he helped explain things as we worked; it helped a lot. I feel much better equipped to work on the build by myself now and hope the rest of the team can trust me with it too.
I think the team’s progress is going well right now. When that Epic Games developer came in and harshly criticized our game, it was frustrating but it brought up some good points that we had left in the backlog for a while. In a design meeting soon after, we came to a decent consensus that we should switch the monoliths to have 3 impactful abilities rather than 4. While I do think the reason we did this was mostly to get away from being to Moba-esque, it does help our scope for implementing new characters quite a bit. We basically are going through and cutting the most problematic abilities (either due to their bugs or their design). With higher cooldowns and mana costs, we plan to make the game more decisive and less about spamming abilities. This was a big change to the documentation I made but it should be all set as of now.
I’m interested to see the team evaluations this time around. I haven’t really gotten feedback as a teammate from this group yet so I’m a bit scared; I’ve had negative opinions about me in the past. I’m really trying to be of use and friendly with everyone but you never know what they’ll say when I’m out of the room. I hope they like me because they’ve treated me well as a member and are all really friendly. I do get a bit concerned with seeing a bunch of tasks by certain people in “New” when we’re about to close the sprint but I’m not sure if that’s due to lack of work or lack of task management. I’ve had a group member that ended up hospitalizing themselves and looking back, I saw some signs. I really don’t want to miss those signs again and I want to help make sure everyone is okay but I know there’s only so much I can do.
Getting back on topic, I want to say the game is in a good place now. We’ve been continuously stifled getting our QA results by various things which is unfortunate. That aside, the build is at it’s best place ever and once we iron out those kinks and implement all the art we have, it’ll be a whole new experience.
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