Concrete Jungle is a Platformer with puzzle solving elements focused on Extreme Difficulty inspired by games like Getting Over It and Super Meat Boy.
Contributions
- Debugging of scripts and fixing critical errors
- Redesigned level puzzles and environmental interactions
- Wrote and Implemented of analytics to track player progression such a number of deaths, death location
- Reorganized and improved asset request pipeline
- Rewriting of backend systems code
My Experience
Concrete Jungle was a project with very little progress when I came onto the project despite having had two previous semesters of work. The game only had some main systems programmed in and a lot of placeholder artwork. On top of that the project had a lot of turn over leaving more new people coming onto the project for the first time than people who had worked on the previously, this turn over also lead to a lack of programmers during the time I worked on it which meant that despite being brought on originally for design purposes my programming experience was needed and I took on programming as my primary role around six weeks in. Concrete Jungle struggled with organization and communication early on due to the majority of its developers being new to the project entirely. Alongside our producer I reorganized and improved our asset request pipeline and our producer reorganized our task log and QA communication pipelines. After the restructure our productivity began to increase dramatically, however problems still plagued the project. Due to the slow start and originally poor communication the project was slow to get to a place where data from live players could be obtained, this caused the project to be designed from the bottom up instead of top down leading to design choices being made based on feeling and experience rather than data as we would have liked. This Project was a great learning experience about the difficulty with high project turn over and how important it is to set up and organize proper communication channels and development pipelines early on.
