Sanctum Infernum - Week 3

This blog post has been adjusted as part of a resubmission assignment.

Hello and welcome back to the now third week of the blog for my newest project. At this moment, the game is still currently unnamed but regardless of that, a lot of things started to kick off this week as we officially started the production stage of the game.

Proper Introduction of Jira and Confluence

This week was the first week in which we properly had properly started using Jira and Confluence. Jira is a scrum workflow tool that will allow us to post tasks to our weekly scrum and assign them to team members to help let everyone know who's doing what as well as being able to inform members of the team by commenting or leaving notes on tasks. Confluence, on the other hand, is the segment of this workspace in which we can upload our documents for the game, such as the GDD, so that everyone has easy access to them. This will be acting as a replacement to Trello so in the previous week we had been importing all of our previously made tasks to it and any other documents to Confluence.

Leads meeting

In this leads meeting, we discussed how we should handle the already rapidly growing backlog of our Jira tasks. Some of the ideas we implemented into how we operate now include only leads being able to create and assign tasks directly. Other team members can add a task by going through our established approval system and then having it added into the backlog for consideration in a future sprint in order to make sure that we don't overload ourselves with tasks that the team leads likely didn't have a say in assigning.

Department meeting

In this week's department meeting people were rounding up what they had worked on this week, though it had become clear that things were progressing quite slowly and things were not quite ready. Many people (including myself admittedly) claimed that this was due to resubmissions (which more people were taking than I had thought) as well as people just running a bit slowly at the moment, though these are not valid excuses and we should improve from this.

The conversation of which dialogue system to use sprung up again, with one of the narrative designers doubling down on wanting to use my previous system from Seams (never felt so flattered before in my life). To my understanding a final decision STILL wasn't made but it is much more in favour of using my system than Fungus at this current time.

Programmer A showed off a movement controller he had been working on and asked the designers to give it a go. When the designers tried out the movement controller, they felt that it needed some additional time in the oven, so for the remainder of the week Programmer A went to polishing the movement controller.

In the programming team

Here in the programming team, I started the week by setting tasks for Jira for the first time in order to maybe get some gameplay prototypes up and running in Unity. I assigned a task for myself and a task for Programmer A.

Here's what I gave myself:

And here's what I gave Programmer A:

With nothing seemingly happening in regards to the Unity project being set up, I decided to just do it regardless of whatever was happening though an issue had prevented me from doing anything first and foremost.

It appeared that the POs had not set up any of the correct permissions for the GitHub repository. I contacted the Birmingham PO to bring this to her attention and after some brief conversation about it I offered to sort out the access permissions of everyone on the team. She gratefully accepted the help and so we used Discord to initially organise things via me and the Birmingham PO making an announcement to everyone explaining what to do.

Shortly after I was bombarded with the details of most people in the team so I got to work with setting everything up. I started out with creating different teams in GitHub itself to sort everyone into:

I then made sure that each team (and anyone that missed the initial wave of getting added) was able to access to repository and have the proper read/write permissions:

After that , I created a new Unity project with the 3D HDRP project template in version 2021.3.8f1 and pushed it onto the GitHub repository):

With all that set up, my goal for this week is to at least have some sort of movement that we could work off of.

Since the game was going to be in a third person perspective, I also wanted us to create our own third person camera system rather than using something premade like Cinemachine to help give us something that we can adjust easier and generally have more control over, as well as to flex a little bit.

I assigned this task to Programmer A, and gave myself the task of beginning to create the RPG turn based system. As you may know, I've created two of these types of things before so I trusted myself that I would be able to pull it off, though at the time I also figured that it would take me more than one sprint to actually fully make it.

The last programmer I did not assign any tasks to, we had another project to work on so I suggested that he got started with that while we worked on these tasks for the week.

At the beginning of this week, I was approached by some of my superiors to discuss the topic of integrating a third party extension to Unity called Playmaker, which is a visual scripting extension. They pitched it as something that designers can use to help with programmers though I had a few issues with using this, namely:

• I, and the other programmers for that matter, do not like visual scripting.

• To my knowledge only a few people from Birmingham even knew how to use Playmaker, it wouldn't have added many more people to help us.

• If something that a designer made with Playmaker doesn't work, it'll be a lot harder for us programmers to fix it unless we were to recreate the script in C#, which would just create even more work for us.

• Doing my own research (and from seeing what the designers who can use it have made) I deduced that solutions in Playmaker are far more convoluted and messy than if they were to be made in C#.

With all of that in mind, I adamantly rejected the suggestion to use Playmaker, and despite their arguing otherwise, I kept this decision as final. The other programmers had agreed with me and even some Guildford designers agreed with me too.

As the week went on and we got to work on our tasks, the other programmer had finished off his movement controller. It has two components:

The PlayerMovement script has fairly simple parameters, but provides very smooth movement for the player compared to other solutions.

The second component revolves around the camera:

The camera script has quite a lot of parameters as you can tell. many of these relate tho the sensitivity of the camera and the angles in which the camera is placed and rotates around the player. The 'CamObstruction' layer is placed on objects like walls, floors, doors and other props so that the camera will 'bounce' off of the object instead of clipping through it.

With working on the turn based RPG system, I had gotten some basic code structure finished (with the usual classes; BattleSystem, Unit, etc.) but because of poor planning and time management on my end I found it difficult to work on this and a resubmission assignment at the same time. Because of this I wasn't able to finish the task in this sprint. I do not think that I will have much time to work on this project next week so I will likely re-assign it to someone else from the next sprint onwards and focus on something else for myself then.

Reflection

This week has mostly been overtaken by something that resulted in poor time management from me, which I feel quite bad for as to me it looks like it's dragging the rest of the team down as we are lacking a major feature of gameplay because of it. The only thing I can do to improve is to both finish what I needed to that was causing these issues and then properly plan out how the battle system will be implemented

Besides that, assigning tasks, using Jira and generally being a leader of others is clearly something very new to me and so far I'm not sure if I am fully on board with the idea of it. I will try and do better with both creating tasks for Jira and assigning them appropriately next week onwards.

That is all for this week's blog post. There probably wont be too much coming from me specifically next week although I will make sure to note progress from the programming team and the leads. Thank you for reading and I'll see you soon!