INTRODUCTION

Gypsy's Tale was a semester-long project developed using Unity and C# as a part of my studies at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE). The project was developed by 7 games development students and was the final assessment task of the second year of studies.

For the Gypsy's Tale project, I was chosen as lead and sole programmer, the first time experiencing this kind of responsibility for a project of this size as well as in a group. One programmer was chosen for this project because the original scope and idea were much lower and simpler than ended up being produced, more on that below.

PROJECT GOALS

The overall goal for Gypsy's Tale was to create a simple, relaxing and quick pick up walking simulation game. The idea was to play as a dog and do various activities around an inner-city park, keeping the gameplay light and focusing on the art. I think for the most part we achieved this goal, with the exception of adding much more gameplay than was originally pitched and intended, resulting in polish issues towards the end of development.

PERSONAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS

• Interactable object system.
• Collectables objects.
• Navmesh AI.
• Creating a basic quest/mission system.
• First time creating a third-person character controller, even though unfinished.
• Finding, solving and fixing complicated bugs.
• Finishing majority of the planned work as a sole programmer.

LESSONS LEARNED

During the development process of Gypsy's Tale, many things went wrong, many things out of my control, but also a few that I could have personally prevented. One of these issues being my ability to work as a sole programmer, it was an incredibly intimidating, stressful and overwhelming job for a project of this scale. I thought I could handle everything thrown at me, but I was wrong. I'm quite hard on myself about how this project ended up, but overall I think I did the best job I could and now know when to ask for help.

Other lessons learnt during the development of this project is how quickly a team can fall apart once a few members stop showing up for work. We were completely within the scope, development was on schedule, and team morale was high. Once development started ramping up, however, we lost four members (over half our team) and sadly resulting in everything slowly failing surrounding development. Quickly we scoped many elements of the project down to account for missing members, but a couple of objectives and the player controller suffered greatly as a part of this issue.