With our new champion Makoa ready to make an appearance, while everything is on fire and with the bugs coming in, I figured now was a good a time as any to do a retrospective! As mentioned in my last post, this patch was centered around me focusing on just the 1st person view of the new champion while making sure his 3rd person view, that was being done by the associate tech artist, was up to snuff.
Now we knew going in that Makoa would need a lot of RnD and iteration, but I can definitely now say that we surpassed not only what we had envisioned (since new uh-ohs and oh craps came up each day) but as well as the time scoped to figure out how to make his kit function...slowly kept expanding. From the early stages of concept to prototype, from rigging to animation, from implementation to kit changes, he saw a lot of rework and took quite a bit of learning. Since his kit was the most unique thing we had done yet, it meant regular white board discussions and trips down to the programmers to request new anim nodes, expand functionality and logic of current nodes, and to fix the way some of our old anim nodes worked. Not to mention, the give and take we had to ask from designers to hone in on a functional but enjoyable champion spurred many topics of discussion.
It's safe to say I learned the pit falls of some of our current tech, while also pushing the envelope for new tech. It wasn't just enough to hack something in, I wanted to make sure it was future proof. Now, that's not to say there isn't hacks for this champion! His tree adapted and grew every time I touched it or had to troubleshoot it because it didn't work with another feature.
We re-worked his abilities a few times and we pushed his deadline back. Ultimately, he ended up shipping 1 week after scheduled. I scheduled time off to go take care of life in Florida thinking he would have already shipped but that wasn't the case. As I was away, I was getting constant emails and chats about last minute kit changes or the current state of the game. Needless to say, I came back the day after content lock and had to dive in to fix as many things as possible before we pushed the patch live.
However, it wasn't too bad because before I left I created a list of things to do and gave them to my associate and caught my senior up to speed and I'm proud to say that they tackled them like a boss. Which is a very important part of gamedev, you need to be able to trust your team and rely on your peers to come through. Not to brag, but I have that here. I am surrounded by creative and passionate people who understand the importance of getting a task done.
In hindsight, Makoa was a testament to people's hard work and commitment. It showed us the flaws in our pipeline and taught us how to manage our personal "salt mines". In the end we still produced something that we've never tackled before and I think it's safe to say we're all pretty stoked on how he turned out. Plus, he's my second character here!
Here's Makoa's reveal trailer: