Team building and Game Dev

#unity3d #scrum #gamedev #datastructures

Hellu, and welcome to my second week at A Wargame Without Compromise (WWC)! 👾

This week began with a code review of our previous deliverables. It was empowering to see every team member explain their achievements; the commitment to individual tasks is high, and the receptiveness to feedback has created a very positive environment. However, due to increased academic workload from other modules, our team had limited availability this sprint. Consequently, we adjusted our scope to be realistic, a crucial practice in Agile development to avoid burnout.

My primary goal was to finalise the building placement system. The map now supports a list of buildings that are automatically placed without overlapping. I used the Occupancy Grid Mapping Nirwan (2021) to verify whether the space in the grid was already taken or not. To solve the issue of the environment looking static or "boring," I implemented a random rotation system.

Implementation: Buildings now instantiate with discrete rotations (0, 90, 180, 270 degrees). This adds visual variety while maintaining the grid-like structure required for gameplay.

During our Monday meeting, I proposed a "Rose, Bud, Thorn" session LUMA Institute (no date), to serve as an icebreaker before diving into technicalities. Drawing from my previous professional experience, where my ex-teammate Ashley used to like doing these sessions and I think they are really fun! I found that Discord chats can feel quite "cold".

Rose: A highlight/success.
Thorn: A challenge/pain point.
Bud: A new idea or something to look forward to.

The group was very receptive. This exercise isn't just for fun; it effectively builds psychological safety, allowing us to understand each other's emotional states before critiquing work. It bridged the gap that digital communication often creates.

We also focused on refining workflows and QA. Allen has proven invaluable in this regard, adopting a "breaker" mindset, pushing features to their limit to find edge cases. He discovered an issue with the map size limits, which we have now capped to prevent performance degradation. Catching this in the early stages saved us significant refactoring time later.

It wasn't all smooth sailing. I spent significant time assisting Allen with Git LFS (Large File Storage) conflicts, specifically regarding the Wwise audio integration.

The Issue: Binary files were not locking correctly, causing merge conflicts.
The Fix: We implemented a temporary workaround, we couldn't fix the LFS issue on his branch so we created a new one, fresh from main, but with the .gitignore and .gitattributes updated before the Wwise integration, but this consumed valuable development time.

I finished the sprint by developing the Movement Restriction System based on stamina and time manipulation.

Rewind mechanic overview: The player now features a Stamina system where movement consumes energy based on a Stamina Per Step property.

By pressing the Toggle Rewind key, the player enters Rewind Mode. In this state, the player can:

Hold Rewind: Backtrack through previous positions to recover spent stamina.
Hold Fast Forward: Return toward the "future" point if they have already backtracked.

The process is finalised by pressing Toggle Rewind again. This commits the changes, restores the calculated stamina, and clears the Fast Forward buffer while maintaining the history for further rewinding.

Logic: I utilized the logic demonstrated by Brackeys (2017) regarding storing transform data in lists, but adapted it to store "Stamina States" rather than just positions, also, instead of using Lists to keep track of the points where the player was, I used Stacks, GeeksforGeeks (2026), since their use case was better in this situation, because we always remove the last visited position.

Action Plan for Next Sprint: I want to make the team more involve on Discord discussions. When we meet in person, everyone shares their ideas and thoughts about our process, development, and mechanics, but on chat, not everyone does. I think a good idea would be to encourage emoji reactions, at least to know if everyone agrees with the ideas, or if they have read the chats.

I'm very happy with the outcome of the week, we have made a lot of progress given our time constraints, I feel that next week we will have a very very good progress.

Thank you so much if you got here!

See you next week for another update! 🛼🤟🏽

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