Conclusion & Reflection

Conclusion

To conclude the project within the scope of my internship, I go through my design challenges to see if the requirements are met and explain the end result.

"Build upon an existing game made for diabetes patients, so they can record a play-through to be played back as virtual opponents by other patients with the same condition."

The first design challenge couldn't be completed in time. This was mostly due to the lack of expandability of the already existing SugarVita infrastructure and code. There were also some technical problems regarding GameBus and their approach on saving data and activities. Their API was simply not designed to save the types of data I needed. Using many workarounds, another intern got the saving and loading to work but it took a lot of time to establish. Meanwhile, I was working on other parts of the project which prevented me from finishing this design challenge in time. It would be fully completed in a few weeks' time, if I'd get the opportunity to work on the feature after my internship has been completed.

"Improve the sustainability and expandability of an existing game so future developers can add and edit the game more easily in the future."

During my internship, this is the design challenge I (forcefully) worked the most on. This is mostly because adding new features usually required some sort of key change to the code. With things like upgrading the Unity version and creating a popup system, I have improved the sustainability and expandability of the project for future developers. Refactoring code also played a key role in improving the code. Dividing complex classes and methods also improved the readability to great extends. All in all, in my opinion this design challenge can never be truly finished but I am more than pleased with the results given the state of the project when I got started. 

"Build upon an existing game made for diabetes patients with new features, so that the patient can get a more personalised experience whilst playing the game."

The first personalisation feature I started working on was the recording of a virtual opponent and allowing the player to share them with their circles in GameBus. Soon after creating the feature locally, I realised the way having a GameBus account was required, would push possible players away from trying the game in the first place. This is why I started researching how this affected the game and how I could fix that. Shortly thereafter, I changed the game to make logging in to GameBus optional. Even though I wasn't able to test the results, it allows for even more incentive to create a GameBus account through the playing of the game and seeing GameBus only features. I also worked on a challenges system where there are personal challenges tied to appstore achievements, and GameBus challenges which are tied to GameBus' native challenge system. The personal challenges are designed to allow the player to explore other ways to play and therefor discover lifestyles within SugarVita. However, this design challenge isn't fully completed, in my opinion this is the basis of future features to improve the personalisation in SugarVita even more.

* For references to specific devlogs based on design challenges, see reading guide at the bottom of the page.

Reflection

This internship I learned a lot about professional communication. I attended weekly meetings with stakeholders and discussed problems and progress with industry professionals. Directly reporting to stakeholders and estimating the time required for specific features are valuable skills I learned during this internship period. Looking back on the goals I had before starting this internship; I've worked alongside professionals with medical background and also professional software engineers.

Working on an already existing project and releasing a new version on appstores, I learned how to optimise code and to test functionalities extensively before releasing. I also learned how to solve problems in complex and unfamiliar code more effectively.

All in all, I'm pleased with the end result of my internship. I think it is unfortunate not every design challenge has progressed as far as I hoped they would but in general I learned a lot about being a professional in the game development industry.