This was written the day after my last day at Bungie. I wanted to wait until a week before Shadowkeep Launch to post it!

Photo of my last Bellevue Sunset at my favorite place in the city, Meydenbauer Bay Park

For my final blog post of my college career I have been asked to answer a few questions in relation to both my final game, and my time at Champlain as a whole!

• How have you grown as a developer?

            I have grown as a developer in many ways over my time at Champlain, but with Arachnotron I have learned so much in only 4 months. From making VR level sketches to having the Inverse Kinematics (IK) break non stop and learning how to create terrain that doesn't make the game look bad. All in all it has been the toughest project during college and I absolutely loved every second of it.  

• As a developer, what are your strengths that you hope will transfer to the working world?

             I really hope my soft skills (like communication, leadership, etc) will transfer. I really hope those skills will help me land the job I want and to be proactive in the workplace. As for the hard skills I know that my love of QA will easily help me out in the future!

• As a developer, what do you still need to work on?

                 I love learning and with all engines and tools there is never a dry spell of things that are new! I need to be able to dig and find new things to help me get to where I need to be.

• What do you believe is the key to success in collaboration?

                     If everyone is having fun working on a game then the game will be fun. The key to success is as simple as that. Enjoying the moments and working hard for something we are proud of!

• Each game we make always has some sort of lesson waiting for us. What was yours during this final project of your time at Champlain College?

                            This is surprisingly easy to answer and it is that regardless of how you do something there will always be a better way you could be doing it. Each week with the game the team got better at doing tasks and found faster ways to get them done (hello level design). The key however is to not get bogged down by the fact that there is always a better way to do something and instead use it as a learning experience.
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It's been one fun ride!
~Conor

This is a little story of the whirlwind that was last week.

April 26 was fast approaching and our team knew it. We were ready for what can only be described as the 3 craziest hours of our lives. Since the beginning of the semester we were told time and time again that the game needed to be ready by that Wednesday (the 24th). Our goal in the last week of polish was simple: Steal the Show. Arachnotron was good, and not in that “oh it is good” kinda way, it was more like “wait this is a student project”. But the game didn't matter for the show, it was how we presented the game that did. If our trailer wasn't as kickass as our game then the entire team would suffer because we'd basically be doing ourselves a disservice to all the blood sweat and tears that we put into the game.

Thus the two goals of the final week were born.

1. Make the best damn trailer ever seen - For this we brought on Spencer, one of Matt's friends who is in Champlain's film program. He helped us a whole ton and basically created strike teams within our team to get B-Roll, scripts and interviews!
   
2. We need to finish the game on time - For this we divided and conquered. The artists had to get done lighting the environment while the programmers bug fixed and us designers polished everything. The main goal was to essentially do enough on the project to make yourself redundant and get off of the build. Monday we managed to have half of the artists, Chris and I off build. Tuesday the rest of the team was working into the wee hours of the morning fixing bugs and cleaning up the game while Chris and I played through builds the team sent us to find an squash as many issues as fast as possible.
   

All in all the final week was insane and super fun. I will upload the video from the show once the VOD becomes available (it'll either be here or on the post mortem post that follows!)

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Saturday, March 30th, 2019 
AKA
The day Arachnotron was at PAX East.

In a sea of video games and cosplay it can be pretty tough to stand out. (Especially at a booth for a college) Showing off Arachnotron to the world was already cool, but at one of the biggest Video Game conventions in North America it was an absolute dream come true. Getting to wear a Pink "Exhibitor" badge (instead of the puke green color they chose for the regular Saturday pass) was also really cool, because it made me feel like I was a part of what makes PAX run, versus just being at PAX. 

This was also the first real time we got to interact using the game with people who just play games instead of other gamedevs. It really helped us realize what was working and not working in our levels, and led to  us improving them overall for clarity. The biggest of these changes came to our tutorial as it was easily the hardest things for new players (this is no bueno, because if the tutorial is hard people won't want to play the game).

Overall it was an awesome experience to get to show off Arachnotron at PAX East and I would 100% do it again if I ever have the chance.

That first little bit of my personal reel that you saw just now had some of our VR Level sketching in it!

Without doing this form of a sketch the level wouldn't really make any sense. 2D drawings in programs like Photoshop or Illustrator don't give us as designers a level of clarity that we are looking for in Arachnotron. With the level being made in VR it allows us to literally flip our level upside-down or on it's side to make sure the level makes sense for a player entering rooms from that direction. One of the hardest (if not the hardest) things when it comes to working on Arachnotron is visual clarity, we as designers HAVE to make sure the level and space always makes sense. This is super tough due to the fact that players can get lost in a room after jumping 3 times. To counter this we tried to make every wall in a room visually different to give the player a form of awareness.

After Arachnotron I don't honestly see myself ever using 2D drawings for level design docs again (with the exception of if it is a 2D game of course).

It is no secret that I love Quality Assurance, and a major aspect to my love of it is the back-end that my team has established because of it. 

Essentally to establish my QA workflow I have this big scary spreadsheet (Like the one pictured above that I made for our polish weeks!). This allows me to track bugs, assign people to fix them and to give details about each bug. It is a nice substitute for programs like Gira or Confluence, because our task managing program (Pineapple Redmine) is not great when it comes to bug tracking as tasks get lost easily. 

I love using Conditional formatting to color code the list as well, Red is High Priority and Blue is Low priority. The colors go from warm to cool priority wise.

As to what I am looking for at a QA session, that varies. Sometimes I have a google form if we need to do some weapon fixes and changes, other times I can usually gather information by watching people play. We have actually gotten a good chunk of features in because of QA findings. Arrows in scan-view, cut-scenes when a door opens, and more! 

Check out this awesome podcast that our Producer, Nick, hosted that includes all of us designers! We talk about level design and pipeline for Arachnotron. 

This week was all about learning Pro-builder in unity. We also brought an updated version of the game to QA, but otherwise not much happened overall. The biggest thing though is we began planning out the train level fully!

This is our Millipede Train that Evan set up, it is pretty cool and I can't wait to see this boss fight evolve over the next few weeks. There are plenty of interesting things about ProBuilder that I learned, one of which being that you can actually change the pivot point of an object in Unity with it. (This would have saved me 4 hours had I known earlier!) I also began to set up a document about making the game more accessible, more on this way later as it will get its own blog post probably sometime in March! Otherwise us Designers are Chugging Along!

​Essentially the entire week was spent getting the team Greenlight for Senior Production. This involved us making a gigantic list of every single thing we humanly think we will need to do for the entire semester, AND put descriptions/risks for every single point. As you can imagine this list is gigantic and took literally the entire week. I am not going to show the list in this blog post because that would spoil the fun of what is coming!