To close out our week of Robotany coverage, we're going to share some thoughts written by one of the programmers of the game, Daniel Ho. I think it is important to let the words of the developers of the game, our interns, be read to paint a clearer portrait of our processes here at the lab in the summer, and to get a more focused understanding of the dynamics of a specific team.

Working on a 2D game in Unity has lots of decision to make, especially so in the area of coding and software development. The whole procedure is kind of like a hack around of the whole Unity engine. We used an unorthodox technique recommended by our Technical Director in the end! We basically play with a 3D world with billboards of characters on a usual 3d world flat terrain. It worked pretty well for most parts of it except that we have some weird Z sorting problem that Bruce(SG Game Lab Programmer) couldn't understand what is going on. However, for the most part, it was quite a good technique as we don't really have to care about depth sorting if we had to use other softwares.

I get to use Sprite Manager 2 and EZ GUI for the graphics. We ran into quite a few problems due to it being a community written library. The initializations of sprites are problematic. It work at times, and doesn't work at times due to the functions running concurrently or not the order we thought it would be.

UI implementation was a breeze with EZ GUI. Although we did some parts of hard coding to speed things up, most of the implementations for EZ GUI seems working as expected. However, as thing happens when some functions can flip in the order they are called. Eg. Update vs OnMouseDown.

Working with Biju is really fun! We get to analyze algorithms and design patterns that actually help me get a deeper understanding of what are the better practices to follow for game programming. Having 2 programmers out of a development team of 9 is really taxing on us. However, I think we communicated really well and manage to work at an extremely efficient rate. 10 over classes in 3 weeks!!!

I really enjoyed working in the team, as well as in GAMBIT. The environment is not stressful, and there is a lot of learning opportunities. We can have fun during work and there was always some laughter going on. This kind of environment really pushed me to do my best without the unneeded stress I get from rushing assignments in school! Awesome!

Thanks for checking in this week, and come back on Monday for another Game of the Week!