WEEKLY NARRATIVE
This week saw the first test of our programming team's workflow. I created Trello cards for each of the tasks for this week, populating the description with as much as I could to make our programmer's lives easier. Once they were assigned we all began working through our tasks.We ran into issues this week around requirements and communication. The abilities the design team wanted didn't have all the information on how they should be implemented. When I reached out to them, I got different answers from each person. This was brought up during our Friday meeting, and we have a workflow going forward. This delay did mean that the abilities for the alpha aren't exactly what the design team wants, but what the programming team coded. They'll need to be updated next week.
Code reviewing & testing has been going well. Any issues were relayed back to the programmer, and fixed. One issue going forward is that someone needs to review *my* code, as I am the code reviewer.
The final step for this week was getting everything together for the alpha build. Each power was created separately, as well as the stamina system, so I had to go in and connect everything together. The two new tutorial levels that were modeled in Maya also had to be brought into Unity and setup with colliders, navMesh, player, enemies, saferoom, goal, camera, etc... I took this task, completing everything except materials for the rooms. Hopefully our level designers will be able to pick up this task as they get on Perforce and Unity.
Lastly, I wanted to implement a redesign of how our enemies function in the game. I created a component-based system with each behaviour as a script deriving from an EnemyBehaviour class. Each behaviour has a priority in the inspector for the level designer to utilize. During runtime, the enemy will run through each behaviour based on priority. I'd like to have my programming team look and critique my system, and once reviewed, we'll have a very straightforward way of creating new behaviours for our enemies, or creating enemies with different combinations of behaviours!
CONTENT WITH HOURS
- Meetings (2 hours)
- Created and assigned Trello cards for all tasks (1.5 hours)
- Testing and bug fixes for new enemy system (4 hours)
- Created Sentry behaviour (2 hours)
- Created two new enemy behaviors for use with the new enemy type (2 hours)
- Track alert behaviour to receive location alerts to go towards (1 hours)
- Scan for player behaviour, notifying nearby entities with the Track Alert behavior (1 hour)
- Changes to footprint trail mechanic (3.5 hours)
- Starting a new trail removes the old (.5 hours)
- Screenie destroys trail 3 seconds after reaching the end (1 hour)
- Changed to use a pool of footprints instead of creating and destroying (2 hours)
- Created instruction doc for designers to use when putting levels together (1.5 hours)
- Code Review (4 hours)
WORKFLOW EXAMPLES
POSITIVE OUTCOMES
- The programming team is working smoothly
- New enemy system is in! Now super simple to add new behaviors without a giant file
NEGATIVE OUTCOMES
- Our new levels took a long time to implement, as the level designers were just now getting their feet wet with our project
NEXT TASKS
- Keep changing the implementation of our mechanics as the level design team decides what they want
- Get the new enemy set up using the new behavior code
- Start getting a design for our own room load/de-load system
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