Week 13 : Final Project Reflection Journal.

I am writing this on the last week of my Bachelor's university study at SAE Dubai. I would like to start off by writing that it was a smooth and rough ride for the past 4 years. I dreamt a lot, learned so much and saw a bit too much. In overall I should say the ride was fun. I got a lot to cherish. I got in wanting to make great games, get a good job and in general ace at life. Because I believed I was good at what I do and that's all it takes and boy was I wrong. I joined SAE on June intake, the year 2018, and its four years since to the moment of writing this document. I always wanted to make great work, create quality effort and most of all to leave a mark behind me. So every game I work on is destined to have passion and great attention on it. I never worked on any of my project at university just for the same of passing a unity. I strongly believe that all of my works represents me and its quality defines my quality and mindset. Therefore I have always made sure that the project always ends up as a representation of both me and the solidarity of our team. Before speaking about our current project I should mention that from my understanding you as a person grows from every projects you work on. No matter if its a studio or a game jam it always affects your way of thinking in one way or another. So from my experience with all of the studio units and especially with the third one I developed a deep understanding about style, architecture and the need of better planning in creative elements like design and programming architecture. For us, speaking as a team. working on the studio-3 game "Pablo Let's Go Bar" shed light on several management issues and lack experience when it comes to code and data management. Towards end of the project we came to several conclusions our self and began thinking of ways to solve and undertake issues like it for the next project. One of the issue we were talking about was that when we work on a project we programmers manage to make a lots of scripts and code elements which started to cause trouble once the project stated to get large in size. The second main issue was that we were using Photon-Networking solution which was expensive and above all had a very rude and unwelcoming dev support and also adding to that a very sort of counterintuitive structure to it, which we were not quiet fond of. The third and saddest of all the things we learned was about the unknow bugs and glitches found/offered in Unity3D engine. Like for example say editing a script for twenty time and the the game not reflecting it when debugged. Or compiler giving error about loosing reference of something internal which we have absolutely no control over and such.

So when the pre-production unit started we decided never repeat the same mistakes we encountered the last time. So we joined in jolly for the unit on July of the year 2021. We were taught by two tutors. So we used to have two sessions a week one with our CIU subject teacher Hind Mustafa and the other with our programming tutor Ahmed Abo Bakar. So when we attended our first class we him for the term. We mentioned our shortcomings and issues we faced during the development of our 3rd studio project "Pablo Let's Go Bar". He carefully went through our issues. Then he suggested that we need to u our coding style to solve most of our issues. First of all he advice us to use the S.O.L.I.D principle through out our development. In short S.O.L.I.D principle was a programing standard designed to support scalability, maintainability and debugging of the scripts. The solid structure allows us to manage code and mainly debug or modify our project without breaking any pre-existed systems. The main key phrase we were told about the solid system was that it ensures that "its Closed to modification BUT open to Extension". By which its mean that every code handles a single responsibility and a new responsibility will be handled by a new script which extend the pre-existing code while also preforming a new function. We were used to our old way of hard referencing all along, so seeing this new style, I should admit as not a fun sight. As you call tell that it require a total rework on our mindset before we even attempt to develop something remotely similar to the said architecture in both form and function. So we planed to implement it but before implementing it we managed to make it with our old way of coding. As I was the one in-charge of the networking solution which by the way we decided to make one our own. Well, I made the unity and front end side of it fully using my old system. And as the backend was fully written in JavaScript I never bothered even to make it properly structured a or even into different managed classes honestly it was very bad and the whole thing was mangled in one single script. So I made what ever I was planning to implement in the old method and presented it to our tutor Bakar. So during a class we went through all of our code, fires off he went with Anikith's code which was all about random level generation and such. Then he looked at Vishnu's code which was about player controls and player movement and lastly through mine which was all about networking and data syncing. Then he began detailing the coding practice we should have followed buy doing our code in the newly taught format. He did so for three consecutive classes and took an extra session for us which was 3 hours long. After that I and my team makes had a discussion on how to start modifying and re-editing our code. I told them lets edit and made it using the new method so we manage to do so within one week.

So with our coding style all fixed up we hope into the production phase of our game. Speaking about our game and the idea behind it. We it all started when we had a meeting discussing about game ideas we could come-up with for our major project. We came-up with a lots and lots of weird ideas. One of our first ideas were making stealth cooking game were the player goes around and steals the ingredients from the street below, either by stealing from the customers seated at the street from the trash cans. We worked on it for till week 7 but we were not very satisfied with what we got. We need it to be more thrilling so we arranged one more brainstorming session with all three of us. That's when we came up with our current idea. I remember that day I was tired and sick, I was getting tired and sick for the past 6 months I don't know why. Anyways, I was lying on the bed with my headset on hearing all the ideas others were telling and suggesting stuffs in between. One of them suggested of making an escape room game. which was a good idea but doesn't serve anything when it comes to uniqueness. So while pondering over it I got a spark of idea like how about an escape room game where one player work against others trying to prevent them from escaping the area. The next week we suggested our idea to the game dev tutor and he happily suggested us to go ahead and prototype it. We manage to make a prototype with two cameras on the screen one for player one while the other was for the second player. We placed some simple rules to the whole game it was a simple game but we found ourselves unable to test it properly as it a totally multiplayer experience. So we decided to make a basic multiplayer prototype. it took as about 4 weeks. Then we had some more brain storming about how to setup the premise of the play. the reason for it is that there were some technical issues mainly lack of time for us to properly design rules of play which balances all the sides of the experience. Then at some point we made it to be a game were one of the players get to be the ghost who tries to prevent the others from escaping the mansion/hotel. Once that was decided we planed to go with it and make. then for the re-playability we made it to have random generated levels. so that the player gets to play with different arrangements every time the player plays the game. For the implementation of it we need to make custom rooms for the level generation for that we came across the need to have modular assets that require proper scale and fixed sizes. So as a team wee went through the asset store found an amazing set of modular haunted mansion pack. we bought it as there was not other option considering the fact that there were no animators or artists in our team.

We came across one of the most threatening bugs when we started seeing the fps going doin after the level generation. We tried a lots of options to fix it but no avail. So respecting the lack of time we decided to by an occlusion culling package from asset store and managed to get it fixed. Then I was having the task to fix up the UI of the game, basically revamp in and make it cleaner. I you would aske me what would have been better. I would say my health. I was not fully able to focus like in my early days due to some phantom fever that shows up out of random. I could have worked more put more effort in perfecting every aspects of the especially the visuals and aesthetics. I also could have managed my time when it come to my attempts to make a custom VoIP system. well guess it was my UDP fantasy. Anyways, apart from that most of the other matters were all good. I would saw as of now I would like to improve the menu and UI more. Also speaking of the Visual Effects, we need to add more visuals to provide the player with feedback and guidance to facilitate an immersive experience. We are planning to work on the game a lot more. At least that's how we are planning to write our own story. We as Knotgames are planning to build a future together by making games and selling it over dev platforms like steam and epic. We were planning to release this game on around 2023 as well will be working on "Pablo Let's Go Bar" through out the next year. We have a lot for to be done in terms of both marketing and advertisement. The main task left for us to do is to make people join our community so that we can build a following that stay with us and from whom we can build a relation and above all a bridge that's bound through respect and caring about the customers standing. For to achieve it we as a team had started already to work on it by making social media accounts and posting our content for people to see an share. We mostly focuses on Instagram and LinkedIn as we manage to find more response from it that any. I am also learning how to make professional looking video content so that the content may look that of quality to the audience. So as closure I would like to put it that, wait a bit and you'll see the game on steam store. So all you have to do then is support us by buying it and we assure you that you wont be disappointed. Thanks a lot to SAE and all my lecturers. Thanks for the fun ride in time. Bye.