Stefan Claasse

Throughout the entire year long project, I was assigned as Programmer Lead of Team Tonk. Some of my responsibilities as PR lead included: Keeping track of all programmer tasks, ensuring code standards are upheld, putting the right people on the right task, risk management and main line of communication with other leads.

Due to all the PR lead responsibilities, I wasn't able to work much on the project directly myself. however, being able to have a high overview of the project and delegating work was a unique experience I otherwise wouldn't have gotten to experience.

One of my biggest struggles with being the programmer lead was to find the balance of programmer and lead. To tackle this, I would make sure to put my programmers on tasks that had no direct influence on my role as lead.

This resulted in me still having a small bit of time to work on tasks myself, like implementing the Jenkins build pipeline, Upgrades and the Analytics Tool.

Besides my responsibility as programmer lead, I was also responsible for the Jenkins pipeline within the project. Since I was the only person in the team with knowledge about Jenkins and Groovy, I was tasked with setting this up.

Starting off with the project, I first created a simple pipeline that would allow us to build our Unreal Engine project. Throughout development however, the pipeline expended to allow for pushing to Steam from Jenkins.

After adding the Steam upload to our groovy script, I also began with running tests from Unreal Engine. To make sure no unstable build would be pushed to Steam, we would first run the test and skip the Steam upload if the project was unstable.

To know what went wrong whenever our build was unstable, I decided to add functionality to push the test results to Google Drive. And as both my programmers and I wanted to have easy access to the drive, I made custom discord messages that would directly link to the drive.

Besides my responsibility as PR Lead, I also contributed to the project by creating upgrade prototypes. As we had too few prototypes to work with, we decided to just create a lot of upgrades to see what sticks. 

One of the upgrades that I made was the thorns upgrade. When chosen, the upgrade would attach a collision sphere to the player that when collided with another player, will damage them continuously until they move out of the way.

This would create a sense of danger towards to the other players as they now had to watch out for not only the bullets, but also the hull.

I also worked on the fire track and ice track prototypes. When a player obtains one of these two upgrades, a trail of collision boxes would spawn behind them and would destroy itself after a certain amount of time had expired.

When a player would drive over the ice tracks, their movement would be slowed and they would become more slippery. When driven over the fire tracks, the player would take continuous damage until they moved out of the fire tracks.

As both systems work very similarly, I decided to create a track base blueprint where both upgrades could inherit from. By doing this, I both reduced my time developing the prototypes while also allowed expansion of other track based upgrades.