Page Outline
Overview
For me, Cosmic Bartender was a big step into game development, and more importantly, systems design because it involved making systems, within a short period of time, that the game had needed and usually what the Designers asked for. The systems I worked on were in attempts to keep functionality to be simple in the sense of not overscoping.
Contributions
In Cosmic Bartender, here are some of the contributions I gave as the Systems Designer
Pouring interaction
Pouring required the use of a drink tap handle that would go into mini-game style interaction.
Multiple taps
Alongside the ability to pour different drink types, the player was set to be able to unlock multiple taps along side the regular taps. This was a feature I did but didn't get the chance to be fully implemented.
Data system and level rating
The game required a way of using the same scene but be equipped to seem as though you went into a different station/world path. So level 1 through 3 may be completed in one world, but it may not be the case for another world. On top of this, each level completed gives a rating for the player with the bronze silver gold type system connected to the face rating you got for that level.
Tutorial functionality
I had worked with the Creative Designer to create a tutorial module system that would allow the designer to do different things that were needed such as pausing the time, pausing the drink interactions, checking when a drink was poured and when it would hit perfect, and so on.
Challenges
In developing Cosmic Bartender, here were some of my challenges as one of the Systems designer as well as relating to general development, and how I overcame them.
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Work Output block from transition to work at home
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Having troubles with working from home prior, since the team was forced to transition to work at home in order due to the situation with the Coronavirus, it was difficult to work on the project in an efficient manner, especially with how much I truly wanted to put into the project.
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To solve this, I had to look at what the issue was and how I could overcome this. The issue had been in essence distraction both from myself, but also from my surroundings. So the first thing I did was since my Desktop PC had caused multiple issues that weren't going to be cut out for optimal work output, I had transitioned to a laptop. Alongside moving to a laptop allowed me to then overcome the second part of the issue which was finding a place where there was the least distraction from surroundings. After being fully transitioned and overcoming the issue of this block, my work output was up to the standard of the development, which I try to go beyond as my own standards of work output.
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GitHub mastery issue
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During development, GitHub had been quite a pain to use personally, but also across the team. Having only a small amount of experience using GitHub from learning from fellow developers during a Game Jam. It was difficult to both use and explain to fellow teammates how to use properly.
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So to overcome this obstacle, I went to research and experiment with how to do certain actions needed like setting up a functioning file that would ignore "junk" changes (or changes that basically not asset edits or additions that usually came from Unity itself
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