Hellu, and welcome to my fourth week at A Wargame Without Compromise (WWC)! 👾
Our primary goal for this sprint was to finally deliver a playable version of our game. We had a higher capacity this week because our other module assignments did not overlap, but we still faced a massive mountain of integration work.
Early in the sprint, I spotted a critical workflow issue, multiple team members were working on similar core files simultaneously, most notably the GameManager. The GameManager was still under active development, but it was a hard dependency for everyone else's features to function properly.
To unblock the team and prevent catastrophic merge conflicts, I took the initiative to restructure our version control workflow. I created a centralised dev branch based on main. I then integrated the work-in-progress GameManager into this dev branch and updated all other active feature branches to point to it. This allowed everyone to use the current state of the core architecture without breaking the main production branch, drastically reducing the risk of major merge conflicts down the line.
My specific feature task was relatively straightforward, create a bullet trail particle effect when a character shoots. It was really enjoyable to continue messing around with Unity's particle systems. However, while the visual trail itself was not difficult to create, I severely underestimated the time required to integrate it into the codebase. Because our systems were not properly connected at the time of completion, the integration took much longer than anticipated.
My final effort of the week was assisting Josh in assembling the actual Demo build just before our team standup meeting. I felt that this sprint involved a lot of rushing, trying to integrate code, resolve dependencies, and update scripts simultaneously. It was a bit exhausting, but seeing the playable game made it absolutely worth it.
I want to give kudos this sprint to Allen, who invested a lot of time into researching and implementing the Game Manager System!
Action Plan for Next Sprint
With the demo ready, I can finally return to my favourite area: algorithms!
- Terrain Generation: I will continue updating the procedural terrain. If time permits, I aim to implement texturing and potentially some foliage algorithms.
- Capacity Planning: I have a heavy workload in other areas next week, so I will ensure I strictly time-box my terrain tasks to avoid overcommitting.
Reflective Learning
While everything came together in the end, the "integration crunch" was a wake-up call. We need to pay much closer attention to the code's architecture. This sprint taught me that a feature isn't truly "done" until it is cohesively integrated. Moving forward, we need to communicate our dependencies earlier to avoid this disjointed scramble at the end of the sprint.
Thank you so much if you got this far!
See you next week for another update! 🛼🤟🏽👻
References:
Driessen, V. (2010) A successful Git branching model. Available at: https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ (Accessed: 23 February 2026).
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