Fragmented Odyssey
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Over two months, four students and I worked together for a game studio called Octopus 8. During the project, I was the programmer for Fragmented Odyssey.
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Fragmented Odyssey is a 2D puzzle platformer where you must shapeshift into different combinations of animal body parts to overcome a variety of obstacles and enemies.
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Elements that I focused the majority of my time on include:
Creating a level editor to help our team's designer craft levels easily.
Randomising enemy spawn locations and trap locations (such as where spikes appear in each room).
Working closely with the designer to create an accurate experience of what he had imagined.
My experience working on Fragmented Odyssey was invaluable. It helped me communicate more effectively with a team over an extended period and helped me understand how to take a project from an idea to a published video game. Some more ways the project helped me were:
Knowing when to signal to my team when I need assistance with a task and how to communicate the issue properly.
Learning to regularly inform my team of my progress through checkpoints on Trello or vocally.
How to effectively liaise with my team solely through the Internet. Being unable to work in the same room as our designer, for example, made it harder to be sure I was doing what they expected for certain sections of the game. However, I could negate this issue through screen sharing whenever I had programmed a significant part of the design.
A Video of a Level I programmed
​The below level is a puzzle where the player must sit atop a pillar with a light above it, as the unlit ones will plunge into the lava. I remember this puzzle being hard for me to program and sometimes getting stuck with where to go next. What helped was realising that I could restart the code if I felt that taking a different approach would be beneficial.
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Instead of trying to force my code to work by making many small iterations, I restarted the programming for the puzzle, which allowed me to see it from a fresh perspective and notice where my previous code had been unnecessarily complex.