Mastery Journal Reflection

Mobile Game Development 2

I feel that this month has been extremely productive and successful. I started out initially continuing to work on the path finding system and creating new sprite artwork for the player character. That first week was dedicated mostly to the artwork which despite it taking some time I feel is moving pretty efficiently. For some of the more recent artwork I have started a system of doing quick sketches as place holder backgrounds and sprites that I can build on later just so I have a head start.

In the second and third weeks I took a step back from my main project to try and build something through to completion and have it deployed to the Google Play Store. I wanted to do this ahead of my final courses so that I have the experience to draw from both when releasing future projects and during my final presentation. Rather than starting fully from scratch I took an endless runner I developed over a week in January and cleaned it up with some extra features and finishing touches. Total development time on the project was about three weeks.

Being my first released project I feel that it was successful enough. Obviously it didn’t gain thousands of daily active users but it gave me a feel for the deployment process, managing monetization features, and pushing updates/hot fixes. It also helped me to realize how familiar I’ve become with the Unity framework and C# which was a good confidence boost for returning to my main project.

The final week of the course I was highly focused on rebuilding the path finding to be better optimized and more efficient. It’s still a work in progress but it’s come a long way from where it started. This ended up being a pretty deep dive in to some computer science topics I hadn’t explored previously and additional features of Unity. In terms of CS it was proper implementation of the A-Star algorithm and Heap Optimization. I had previously built out an overly extensive system for checking nodes on the grid that was more manual and inefficient but worked, after doing some studying and exploring other implementations I was able to condense it into a more efficient search and adding the heap memory allocation on top of that has helped to make that flow better when the game is running. With Unity I discovered the Gizmos feature which allows for things like the grid nodes to be given a visual element for debugging purposes, this really helps to narrow down some of the more abstract functionality that would otherwise not have a visual representation. I’m positive that the Gizmos feature will become an extremely useful tool moving forward and I think I’ve set myself up to really make some progress in both game and software development this coming month.