Devlog 1 | 6-19-2024

Featuring the programming team!

Starting this week and coming in from last week the programming team has put together the MVP or the Minimum Viable Product. This entails the ability for up to 4 players to spawn in and battle each other with a basic combat system. They have also put together a crater and fracture system, allowing for dynamic destruction of the environment by the player which is one of our unique mechanics that the team is trying to implement into the game. Started looking into implementing netcode in the case that we will be able to fully implement it later on. Lastly also have started developing various abilities and augments which will be a focus to continue editing into next week.

Speaking to some of the members!

We got the chance to speak to 2 members within the programming team aside from sitting in on one of their meetings, and we were lucky enough to catch Keenan and Jerry!

Keenan!

Starting off with Keenan, he is actually the team lead for the programming team and is in charge of handling his team of 7 programmers and 2 additional secondary programmers. On top of leading team meetings, participating within design meetings, distributing tasks, and organizing day by day/week by week duties, Keenan is able to handle quite a handful of programming tasks himself.

Keenan found himself wanting to find a large team to work with only having prior experience working in small groups in a class setting with the biggest group being only 7 people. Aside from his passion of just making a game, getting the pipelines of multiple teams working together to create one product was something that would create a real world experience compared to a class and small group of developers. He has stated that he is really excited to tell his friends in a couple of weeks to go check out this game that was published on Steam which he helped create.

In terms of programming tasks most of his time these past few weeks has been spent on making destroyable/interactable terrain working a lot with multidimensional arrays and editing type maps. The process of working on this to be transparent was "painful, but at least it works now." But with that the implementation of this extremely important mechanic for our game should be relatively easier for all the other developers thanks to Keenan's contribution. With the upcoming week the focus now would be to work on the refactoring of the weapon system, and the plan with the augment and card system which is another integral part of our game, differentiating that and planning on how to implement that into our party game.

Jerry!

Jerry is another programmer who found himself looking to get a more professional experience working with big groups in the efforts of making a fun game for others to enjoy. He is currently also a member of the Video Game Development Club at ASU, which he compares this studio to slightly but the main difference is a higher level of commitment within the people in our studio as the stakes are higher and not just for a club. He is very excited to be on a team of roughly 20 people who are committed and passionate about creating games. In fact he wasn't aware that the game would be posted onto Steam so hearing that was exciting as he'll have a published game and is excited to get that out there for others to enjoy.

Last week Jerry was working on the weapon and ability system, working with another programmer Maguire, Jerry tweaked the current weapon system and built the base class for the abilities and the handler by putting input systems into the handler. On top of that created a dev Handler that many of the other programmers have found very helpful throughout this process. This week the main goal is to work on abilities and implement them into the actual game, and adding interfaces within what he's already built. He mentioned how it has been a bit daunting watching the ability list grow and grow so he's excited to start implementing them as they have some really fun and creative ideas there.

But outside of this studio Jerry is also creating a game with some of his friends in China! It is a tower defense game that has been working on for quite some time, and is slowly getting the hang of it. Jerry is quite excited to continue working on that after the studio has published Arachnoid on Steam.

Till Next Time!

Thank you reading and showing interest on the progress of Arachnoid! We'll slowly be adding more updates as time goes and we hope you continue fueling your interest for our game as everyone on the team has been working really hard!