
Jesús PinedaWelcome to my first week of work for A Wargame Without Compromise (WWC)! 👾 For the next 4 months,...
Welcome to my first week of work for A Wargame Without Compromise (WWC)! 👾
For the next 4 months, we'll be simulating a Game Studio environment as part of my MSc Computer Games Development at Manchester Metropolitan University, and we have to keep a Dev Log of our weekly process.
So, last week, there were some pitches for potential games at class made by the students in our course. From those, we had to choose one project we would like to work on, like the one we felt more interested in. WWC was presented as a game similar to XCOM or Phoenix Point, games I hadn't played before, so why did I end up here? 🤔
On first glance, I felt the gameplay was quite similar to Baldur's Gate 3, which I tried once, but, people who know me from my undergrad or that have worked with me in the past, know that I like algorithms and problem solving, find solutions to things that might sound complicated, and also, that I'm a big fan of Age of Empires and Age of Mythology, and this game had something that in my mind integrate those aspects: Procedural Terrain Generation.
"That sounds fun!" I told Adam, one of my friends in class, "I found it funny you find it fun", he said (or something like that).
The class was distributed across 4 projects, and the WWC team ended up as:
Since WWC was Josh's pitch, he made the role distribution taking into account who would fit on each role and who wanted to work on what. I think we also were also so lucky, because everyone got to work on the tasks we wanted, so that made the workflow so smooth for the first week. Josh had a GDD draft that we discuss on our first team meeting to start working on. 💪🏽
For my last Trimester project, I made a simple dungeon generator system, so I knew the terrain generation was going to be... difficult, but exciting! So, for WWC, I was given the task to research and experiment for a first approach to dungeon generation, I saw a lot of presentations, YouTube videos, search for information on what other videogames had applied for terrain generation and why, I was also told by Jimmy Mullin, one of our class teachers, to start with Perlin Noise, Daniel, a classmate, also recommended me to search for Marching Cubes. There was A LOT of information, but I was able to follow some tutorials with Perlin Noise and properly understood how it worked. I made some experimentation to create maps from a Heightmap and to subtract one heightmap to another. I was feeling kind of lost to be honest, but after talking with Josh and defined what it was expected or needed for the game, I felt more confident in my progress. To put a cherry on top of my procedurally generated map with Perlin Noise, I also procedurally placed a building in the map and flattened its surroundings, which made me feel proud of 🥲, and I felt prouder when one of the professors (Connah Kendrick) told me he was impressed with what I achieved during the week 🥲🥲🥲. This is the result:
In addition, my vast experience with Scrum, Git and Jira was useful in this first week. I helped the team to have a more organized workflow, setting up standards for User Stories, Pull Requests, Development flow (such as Code Review), scope, to be honest, I felt like working as a Technical Leader, which for the first time, I enjoyed 🕺🏽also, as a team, we defined some standards and made group code reviews, peer reviews and helped each other with some blockers. We were also selected as Team of the Week! Yey!
Thank you so much if you got here!
See you next week for another update! 🛼🤟🏽
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