Work Experience
Plugo Detective (PlayShifu)(
Having completed my main tasks on Plugo Farm, I was assigned to a small team within PlayShifu tasked with bringing one of their existing games on another platform to their Plugo platform - Plugo Detective. While it was a small team, things went fairly smoothly during the initial stages of the porting process of the game. This game involved the use of a flashlight in game to be able to find clues in a scene, much like a "point-and-click find item in scene" game.
My main task during this project was in level design. With a few main levels having already been built, I was tasked with rebuilding these levels while also adding in a few new levels as well. It was during this phase of the project that I began to notice that they had been using a more rudimentary (and temporary) was of making these levels. As this used a flashlight to find items in the scene, I soon came to realize that the previous developers of the game had used two version of the same assets - a lit and unlit version of the same asset was used.
This led me to work with the developer on creating a more seamless experience for the players. Instead of using two varying versions of the same assets, we began to use one (the "lit" version) and proceeded to apply a dark filter on the camera for view. For the flashlight, we used an overlay affect for the flashlight to remove the filter in places where the flashlight was being used in the scene.
POST MORTEM
What Went Right:
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Filter - As a result of messing around with Unity during my freetime, I was able to quickly and efficiently come up with a better solution for the game and the desired effect.
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Optimization process - Having tinkered around Unity using my personal projects, I had learnt about the optimization process early-on. This resulted in my being able to optimize the game for better use on mobile devices upon release.
What Went Wrong:
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Team Cohesion - While team cohesion was something that was going right during the initial phases of the development of this project, it had started to deteriorate when the developer felt that I was "intruding" on his area of expertise. Thankfully, however, it did not affect the work on this project.
CONCLUSION:
While this project had some problems with team communications towards the end, it helped me refine some of the skills I had acquired prior. Even though there were rough moments towards the end, it was still a memorable and refining experience, overall.