So yeah, Arachnotron has officially ended development (for now at least), and I figured now would be as good a time as any to look back on the semester and my own growth as a developer.
What I learned
If I were to talk about all of the things that Arachnotron taught me, we'd probably be here for way longer than anyone would want. This game is going to stand as one of the coolest things that I've ever made in my life, and one of the biggest teachers for me. Obviously, I learned a lot more about using Unity ProBuilder, but I think using it so much on this game will help me with getting the hang of other modeling software (at least the basics).
I think I also learned a lot about the process behind working on such a big team. It showed me how crucial our communication needed to be so that everyone was on the same page. Thankfully, I think we did this effectively enough that we didn't have to deal with a lot of issues it seemed like other teams were having.
Where I Can Improve
I think the biggest thing that I learned about how I make my levels is that there are a lot of times during white boxing where I want to be too fancy. Specifically at the end of the semester, I wanted to make the fuel lines in Arachnotron look really good. What I didn't realize first was how long that actually took, but even after, I still tried to do this. Overall, I think I probably wasted too much time trying to make things look good when we could've done just fine with more basic geometry. Knowing this now, I think I can go into my professional career and tone things down just a bit so I can make things move faster.
From a team perspective, I wish I had been able to communicate with our environment artist, Mike, just a bit more. Some issues came up when I was designing the train station, and it sounded like he was going to the other designers to address the issues instead of me. I wish I could've addressed this sooner so that we might've been able to avoid some of the art issues that we had.
Final Thoughts
Being a level designer on Arachnotron has meant so much to me. Back when I left Change, Please!, I wasn't really in a good place, and was wondering if I made the right choice to leave the game I worked so hard on behind. Now that a semester has gone by, I can honestly say that it was the right thing to do. From day one, the social environment of this team has been nothing short of amazing. Everyone on the team has so much energy and passion for this game, and even though it wasn't always easy making it, we still had so much fun doing. I'm never gonna forget this game and everyone who supported us while we were making it. This really has been the time of my life!
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