This week was marked by more difficult times than usual. On Friday morning last week, Bittarello and Christian decided to create different version of the track constructor, one that would make it much more intuitive to create tracks. Players will be able to click and drag the cursor to where they want the track to go instead of clicking on individual track parts. I wasn’t sure how Bittarello was going to implement it, but it seemed like a big task and might take a long time.
On Monday afternoon, after our normal meeting, Bittarello, Christian, and I further discussed the constructor. Bitarello said he had a functioning version of the new construction mechanism, so Christian and I tested it out. At first, I was somewhat shocked because it automatically laid the track exactly how I imagined it for my algorithm.
The new track constructor in action.
It was really cool to see it work because it was a huge step in the right direction for the development of the game. However, I wasn’t quite sure how to react. It was fairly disappointing to see that Bittarello had seemingly completed the functionality that I have been working on for so long. And, it seemed, he had done it is so little time.
As Bruno and I were looking through the code, however, he pointed out that he had “hard-coded” the moves into the track constructor – meaning that he had taken somewhat of a shortcut for the sake of functionality, but we would need to go back make it flexible before it would be useful. He explained that what he wrote wouldn’t be effective if there weren’t a engine driving the intuitive functionality. And that’s where my algorithm would come into play.
In fact, whereas it seemed like Bruno had solved the problem that I have been working so hard on, he had simply highlighted the importance of it by showing how powerful it can be for users. It started out as a sort of blow to my project and ended up being a great compliment.
This weekend, the Rockhead team planned a get-together. As far as I understand, they plan a weekend activity every month or two. There have been numerous conversations, mostly “smack-talk,” about the go-karting outing the week before we arrived. It seems like it forms a large part of the Rockhead culture. Saturday evening, most of the team met up in Cidade Baixa to talk and have some time away from work. Although the office culture is already quite relaxed, it was heart-warming and inspiring to see how close everyone is.
