Ghrystlyst

My Contributions

Almost all of the game’s core mechanics, such as the playing grid, tile placement, NPC shops, among many more, as well as a large portion of the game’s overall framework (game rules and balancing, saving, etc.) were largely developed by me. Of course, I was assisted by other colleagues, as I had assisted them also, and some of the game’s more interesting features were a direct result of collaboration.

For example, up until halfway through the three-month internship, the hexagonal grid’s internal structure was simply that of a regular square grid with an offset. This was initially done for testing purposes in the beginning, but our team ended up continuing to use it, and therefore continuing to work around its shortcomings. Due to said improper structure of the grid, we had to resort to inefficient methods for finding a cell’s neighbours, such as spherecasting. This, for reasons unknown to us, only worked on the first day. When the player reaches the second day in-game, this method would completely break, and assign every single other cell in the grid as each other’s neighbours, which, needless to say, broke a lot of the game’s logic. I ended up revamping the grid out of sheer frustration, and what resulted was the game’s iconic hexagonal playing table.

This was not my only major contribution. Another point of frustration for the whole team was the amount of ‘code debt’ we’d put ourselves in because the entire game essentially ran from one script, which made it grossly inefficient and prone to bugs, very hard to read and understand, and was overall bad practice. For an entire week, I was working tirelessly to debug, untangle, and decouple not just that monolithic class, but almost every script used in the game. This ended up drastically improving performance overall, as well as making that specific class much easier to use and less cluttered. This was one of the single biggest overall changes made to the game’s code.