Seams - Week 3

Hello again and welcome back to my somehow consistently weekly blog for Project PsychWard. This week there was a lot of progress in pretty much every aspect except my own field, which doesn't mean that I have nothing at all to show, but it certainly isn't any more than the last two weeks at the moment.

Team Changes/General Progress

Much like last week we now have another new member joining our team. This time around they're an artist which means that we have 2 full-time artists on our team now. They've already begun working on assets for the game and so far they look quite promising so I'm looking forward to working with them.

In our meeting on Friday, we had our first look at a draft of the story, including information on every character as well as every event both leading up to and during the game. With this story base established everyone could properly start designing the game.

A lot of things started being planned from here, including room designs and ideas for various mechanics and who would be programming them. One of the things planned for me to program is a bulletin board UI that would be in the player's room. Looking at it would show all the different profiles of each character, which would also display their active quests and any additional pictures from them.

(A whiteboard of some of the plans we made on Friday)

Additionally, we finally got a Github repository set up for the game. It has multiple branches for art, level design, music and programming. The hope is that everyone can use their respective branch to get whatever they are working on finished and then we can merge it with the main branch when everything works.

(The joys of organisation)

Current Assignment

My assignment this week was to, as I mentioned earlier, create a UI that can display character profiles. At this current moment in time, that system is quite frankly no where near being done. But I also wouldn't say that I've done nothing at all.

The first issue that came to mind when I started working on this assignment is that every other outside component for this UI (that is, characters themselves and quests) hadn't even been properly planned yet. So the first thing I needed to do was create at least something in regards to those so that I would have something to display at all in the UI. So with that in mind I created two new classes; Character, and Quest. There isn't much to show besides raw code so to make it a little more interesting I made them into class diagrams

(Admittedly I haven't made a class diagram in over 2 years so if I did something wrong I wouldn't be surprised)

The Character class stores information such as the character's name, their portrait as well as any unlocked quest/photo both stored as lists. You'll notice as well that there is a voice variable too. I put this in primarily as a test, as I realised while making the class that I could implement it into the dialogue system so that designers would only have to insert a character object for each piece of dialogue rather than the name, portrait, and voice separately. I haven't implemented that idea yet but its something I want to try out maybe next week. The AddQuest() and AddPhotos() functions will take a quest or photo respectively and add them to the correct list so that when the UI loads the data from this class, it should be able to keep track of which quests are currently active and which photos are unlocked. There currently isn't a save system implemented though there shouldn't be too much extra work involved to get that working alongside this. (Though there is a chance that more functions may need to be added in that regard).

The Quest class inherits from ScriptableObject (as opposed to Character inheriting from MonoBehaviour), and will contain the name of the quest, the description, the type of quest (this uses an enum that has 3 types: 'MAIN_QUEST', 'SIDE_QUEST' and 'REQUIRED_SIDE_QUEST'). It also has an int called 'QuestID' in which I figured using an integer value to represent specific quests elsewhere would be a good idea for identifying which quests you've completed. The generally idea I have with this class is that since it inherits ScriptableObject, designers will be able to create new quests very easily, and during specific events add specific quests to a specific character in order to activate it. At the moment though I'm not sure how to approach win conditions but I think that'll be sorted when we start actually making proper quests.

As for the UI itself. I was struggling a lot with how to approach making it. The sort of design I was told it would be was that of a bulletin board with sticky notes representing the character profiles themselves, and they would appear as you meet the characters. Programming that doesn't sound very hard but when I actually got down to attempting it I ended up doing the equivalent of banging my head into a wall repeatedly. A big part of this that I'm primarily struggling with is with how it will be laid out. Will it need a scrolling interface? Will the sticky notes be placed in a random order or should they be predetermined? These are things that ultimately I struggled with deciding/figuring out and that's more or less where its been left this week. I think I just need to talk to the designers to get something worked out (it would help a lot on my end if the UI graphics were finished but that's just me thinking).

All in all, I'm just disappointed that I couldn't figure out a solution this week. I think that if I work on something else for a bit I can probably be in a better mental state to figure this out, but looking back I think I could've definitely spent a bit more time looking into things more and planning before doing programming.

That's all that I have to say this week. Thanks yet again for keeping up with the development of Project PsychWard, I hope that next week will be a little more successful than this one but we'll see.