Owlet

Challenges & Lessons Learned

Owlet taught me a lot about developing a game with your own proprietary engine. A challenge that me and the whole team faced was switching focus from engine to game development. We got caught up fixing lots of small bugs, adding features, as well as additional tools that our designer and artist teammates wanted added to Pepi Engine. We began working on those and a lot of time passed. However, in a few weeks time, we realized we are wasting precious time. In the end, we managed to switch our focus just on time and managed to produce a pretty good game in the end. I learned a key lesson from all of this which was that we need to prioritize what software needs to be developed. Requests from other disciplines are important but in this stage of developemnt, working on gameplay features was much more important.

Another challenge that I faced during the development of the game was learning to build gameplay features with other people's systems. While I was one of the eight developers that made Pepi Engine, some of the systems I had to work with were made as personal projects by some of our teammates before the engine came together. To make things go by faster, I spent time talking the creator of the given system I needed to work with, where they gave something like a "crash course" of how it works. From there, I dove in and figured out the rest through experimenting with their code hands-on. It was not an easy process, but it showed me how to work with other people's code, ask questions that come up and contribute to the project effectively. This taught me how to navigate large and unfamiliar codebases and build features on top of them, which is key when working inside a custom engine.