Kent Chua

Create stations and lab objects behavior

Set code and project structure

Guide programmers as a lead

As a lead programmer, I was mostly distributing tasks to my programmers as they all have their own preferred mechanics to work on. I gave them guidance on how certain mechanics would work as a decoupled system so that it's easier to expand. When the systems they worked on are ready, I review it and merge them when necessary.

One notable task I did was working on the carrying object mechanic.

In the game, there are two types of objects that can be carried physically by the player — a flask, or a liquid ingredient

Each type has their own characteristics

However, they both share the same behavior of being carried by the player

So, I created a base class called LabObject, which is then inherited by two subclasses called FlaskObject and LiquidObject.

The player holds a reference to a LabObject, which an object of type FlaskObject or LiquidObject can still be assigned to the reference. Hence, upcasting.

When a station (the places where you interact like the mixing station) gets interacted by the player, it can process what the object the player is holding by downcasting the LabObject to either a FlashObject or LiquidObject.

This is also expandable if there are new types of objects.

This was my very first time working in a group project in game development. I learnt a lot about working as a team and as a lead.

While working on this project, I was able to adapt quickly.

For example, one of my teammates was handling all connections between animation and events from script. When the teammate was unavailable to work, I was able to take over the task and communicate with the VFX/Animation department to accomplish the goal within time.

Almost everything I encounter in this project was new to me, including creating a document for version control. And as the lead of programming, I was responsible to create a version control document.

Some members of the group had no experience working with version control before so I discussed with the product owner on what’s needed for the document as well as understanding how our project is going to be.