This project was a bit different as we only had 3 people in the team in total. I worked as a gameplay programmer on this project, and was responsible for all of the player mechanics.
We scoped the game for our smaller than usual team, and still aimed for a commercial, finished project. We Succeeded in this and the result is my best game I've done to date. The game is available on Steam.
After the concept was set, I wanted to make a small battle plan for the project. It simply was “Everything that has more than one action, needs to have a state machine.” From the very start we knew how the player character needed to work, so we knew the states it needed to have in order to work. There were quite a few advantages to this approach in this project. First, the state enter and exit functions were standardized across all states. Second, the overall look of the code itself was very well structured and easy to read.
After the state machine foundation was laid, I started to work on the player mechanics, and used most of my production time to make sure it was bug free. When I started to experiment with the dash, I knew that the Unity colliders would not suffice for such an fast object. The player could clip through walls with ease. So I decided to implement custom raycast checking for the player dash. A good chunk of time went into just developing this but it paid off. Once it was done I didn't have to edit it again. It was time to polish.
We had scheduled a good chuck of time to just adding juice and polish to the dash mechanic. Since it was the major mechanic of the game, it needed to be solid as diamond. Multiple effects of hit-stun, screen flash, screen shake and a good sound effect for killing enemies made the dash feel good to use.
Most importantly, the production side of development worked pretty flawlessly. We scoped our project very well and established a solid production pipeline very early on. After a basic schedule was made and project management tools were set, we were ready to go. Crazy how much easier things are to work out when your team size gets cut down to one third! It was the first project where we didn’t have to think twice on any particular feature like, “I’m not sure if we can make it work properly”, things just worked, people were very, very competent at what they did and we had a solid base to work on. Of course we had more planned than what we achieved, but that’s just game development, ain’t it?