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Hometown Hero

Purpose:

Creating a Unity game in 48 hours that was WWE themed, developed for portable devices, and aimed at ages 6+, for the Fullsail Hackathon in August 2013

 

Description of Game:

Mobile Touchscreen-Based First-Person Action

 

Team Setup:
1 Producer, 3 Programmers, 3 Artists, 1 Sound Engineer

 

My Role:
Team Lead / Designer / Programmer

 

Tools I Used:

Unity 3.5, Maya, C#, Microsoft Word

 

My Contribution to the Project:

Since the producer was a late addition, I was still left in charge of organizing the team, leading all brainstorm sessions, making final decisions on design choices, and managing the workflow and integration of assets. I also was helped code the more minor sections of the game until the other producer could take tasks off my hand, and then I was left in charge of gameplay programming.

Thoughts on the Project:

This was a major event for the entire campus, as well as our team, as we all had formed to compete against the other teams for prizes and glory . Everyone on the team (aside from the new producer) was someone I knew the capabilities of, and I knew we had a really strong team setup, so I was overjoyed to begin work with them and see what we could pull off together.

Looking back, I certainly wish I had gotten more of a chance to code on this game, but since everyone required me to hop around, assisting them, or managing, I had almost no time to spare for major code efforts like architectural layout. However, I trusted the other two programmers greatly, and made sure they both had the tasks assigned to them that were most important, and helped them fix any issues they had. It was a major turning point for me as a programmer, as I had a hard time trusting another programmer to do a task in my place up until then, so it was a strange mixture of relief and sorrow when I ended up not being the primary coder on the team.

The team got along great, and we were highly confident in each other's work, despite all of the (expected) setbacks that happen in a short production cycle. We managed to dance around all of the problems that came up, and turned out a fine product that we were happy to say met the expectations placed on us by the contest.

Overall, I learned the value of trusting my team from this project the most.

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