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Everest Expedition - Postmortem

Everest Expedition - Postmortem


I have been working as a programmer on the game Everest Expedition for CAGD 370 at CSU-Chico. It is a prototype for a game based around climbing a mountain with a pickaxe using the Unity collision and physics systems. We just finished our very last sprint in the process and are no longer working on the project, and throughout the 5 sprints I think I had a pretty rough start due to some personal issues I was dealing with, but ended up finishing it off pretty well.


Center puzzle of the level using my system

In the first two sprints, I only finished 2 points worth of cards, which is clearly not enough for a full 2-week sprint. I was dealing with some personal issues during this time that massively distracted me from my work and caused me to fall behind in the prototype progress. On top of this, I was deeply struggling to try to understand the unity collision and physics since this was the first time I had ever massively relied on them before in a project. I had about a dozen failed scripts to try to make the player’s pickaxe function as intended, and had to continuously change my approach to try to find a way to make the game work. This was also the first time I had worked with Unity’s joint system, so I had to do a huge amount of research to learn how to use each one correctly, which took a considerable amount of time and testing to learn. Looking back on this I definitely should have gotten help on this sooner, and I should have communicated with my professor better about what had been going on outside of class to make sure that he and my group knew I would be lacking a bit.

After these 2 sprints though, I picked up the pace a lot more. I was able to complete 6 points in the 3rd sprint, which was a massive improvement, as well as finally getting the physics to function as they were intended, which was a huge relief for me. On sprint 4 I lacked a little bit more with 4 points, though it was not nearly as bad as my first few. In our most recent 5th sprint, I was able to finish off the prototype with 5 points, closing out the project and doing much better than I had started. By this time, I was much more familiar with all of the systems our game was based on and was able to fine-tune all of the systems we had been working with so the game would feel a bit better to play for the players. I was able to correct my old, primitive colliders to new, more accurate ones, and fix some faulty force and gravity numbers that made it extremely difficult for the players to navigate at some points.



Fixed weight and force numbers


This means that in all I was able to complete 19 points over the span of the project, which is much less than I had hoped. If I had maintained the pace I had in the last 3 sprints, I would have had closer to 25 points in all, which means the first 2 sprints brought my total down by just about 6 points, give or take since I may have done less or more. Seeing this lack out of my first few sprints shows me that in my next project, I need to do my best to communicate with people about what is going on and what I need help with, and I need to learn how to pick up momentum and push through hardships. There were a lot of things that went poorly during this process, namely the early stages of it, but I was able to learn from my mistakes and figure out all the new issues being thrown at me. What went well through the project though is that I learned a lot about Unity’s different systems that I can work into my future endeavors. I also learned a lot about C# that I had not known before since I hadn’t done a ton of programming. I had to research a lot of the scripts I was trying to write, but in the end, it taught me a ton about writing scripts and how to organize and set them up well.


Fully finished joint script.


Overall, I didn’t end up performing as well as I had hoped during this project. If I could go back to the beginning with the knowledge I know now, I definitely think it would have been a smoother process, but I am planning to apply this new knowledge in the future and I believe I have grown as a person and developer because of this hardship. I am looking forward to my next project and have confidence that I can do well all the way through.


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