Overview
NAOS-01 was the final project of my HND. Our programming group was put together with the art and design cohorts to build a game the way a junior team would inside a studio, with several of the lecturers taking the producer role. We were handed a genre and a set of guidelines; every other decision was ours to make and to defend.
Working like a studio
On the programming side we split the work between the seven of us. The rule we set ourselves was that the designer should be able to tune anything we wrote without coming back to us: systems went into C++, and their parameters and behaviour were exposed through Blueprints. We also wrote on the assumption that things would be thrown out — if art or design needed something rebuilt, it got rebuilt, and code written defensively around that assumption survives that better.
As the project went on we ran testing sessions to close out development and find bugs. The last stretch was the part a coursework project usually skips: the whole Steam publishing process, from the store page and build uploads to the API integration on our side.