Super Mega Death Dodgeball
This is another school project made with other students. In this project, groups were made up of students ranging from all the different HBO-ICT focused educations that the University of Aplied Sciences of Amsterdam offers. This project had companies which the schools had close ties with, act as clients which we had to build software for. I got lucky and I got to work with the company Blender. The assignment was to make a game in the Blender Game Engine (which I did not know existed before the assignment). Blender asked that we delivered an online multiplayer game, which kids could use to learn from and afterwards make their own game (or modify ours) in the Blender Game Engine.
In this project I had my first experience with GIT (which I am now very comfortable with), and networking. These were both great challenges which I almost conquered. I was unfortunate to have struck some bad luck with getting grouped with team mates who were not interested in game development at all. This is not a problem on it's own ofcourse. It is not suited for everybody. Yet every task that could have been done by them that did not have much to do with game development were shoved over to me (networking).
Since I did not know how to make software that could be played by multiple people online and that I had to develop it in Python (a language I was completely new to) it took a while before I got the software running. In the end, it did work. Sadly, since I had invested so much time in trying to get the network running, I had hardly time left for the other tasks that needed to be done. I hate to blame other people for shortcomings from projects that I worked on, but this assignment was simply to big to do the work of 4 people on my own. This meant that the end product is a game that is clearly in very early development stages.
Maybe I'll remake this game in the future since I still like the concept (Super Smash Bros. mixed with dodgeball), but I have no desire to return to this version. The project brings memories of a really tiring project group that I would like to forget. Despite all this, I am very happy with the things I learned during this project about SCRUM, GIT and networking.