Studio 2 - Week 12
What have I accomplished this week as a developer?
Week 12! We did it! Burnout is most certainly real. I couldn’t be more exhausted this week but thankfully after iterating upon feedback for Heartland it is in a really good place and now focus is just on written assignments. One thing that has helped me out a bunch with getting through this week has been going into uni to work all day. The fact that I was in a learning environment and surrounded with like minded creative people I was able to focus on smashing out work. This gave me the energy and drive to get our build and any outstanding tasks I had left completed. I still have lots of work to do over this final week but I decided to take the weekend off work which was also absolutely pivotal in surviving this final week. Knowing when to make the decision to rest is an incredibly important part of being a developer and something I definitely think I am getting better at.
What have I learned this week about development and being a developer?
If you have read my previous dev diaries you would see I spoke about how much I was enjoying polishing Crowd Control. Our release date for that has been pushed out and a bunch of new features are going to be implemented and some have already been added. When it came to Heartland however polish has again been amazing. We actually got feedback from our playtesting which showed that players actually understood the narrative and felt the exact emotions we were trying to evoke. Once we knew that was already coming through strong enough, we were able to focus on player feedback. This player feedback came in multiple ways, more specifically we added a particle effect on click which felt really good and gave pinpoint accurate positioning for where the farmer was about to move. Next we added the NPC characters names as UI elements which would show up when you mouse over them, this made clearer who each character was and their position in the narrative. Even though they were small fixes which didn’t take a huge amount of time, the effect for the player and the game overall was immense and extremely valuable to the game.