Sanctum Infernum - Week 5

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

Hello and welcome back to the blog for my current unnamed project, this week was pretty terrible, both in terms of progress and just life in general. I won't go into too much detail in that regard, but a certain event that occurred does need to be addressed. This blog post is going to be a little different from the usual structure as I explain a little story that occurred this week.

The locked room incident

The basic gist of this is that while working late into the night on my task this week I ended up locking myself out of my room without a phone, meaning I had no way to get back in. After about 6 hours I was able to re-enter my room but crashed and fell asleep before I could finish off my work.

To add some additional information, I had locked myself out around 1 AM on the day that we had to submit a prototype build for our superiors to check out by 9 AM on the same day.

The first build

I woke up on the same day at about 3 PM to a lot of chaos, people were wondering where the build was and it got to the point where someone on the design team (my friend who is the narrative designer), came to my dorm to check up on me.

The best way I can guess what happened is that nobody knew how to compile a build for the game and the POs never specified who would be doing so. They may have naturally assumed it would be my responsibility (which normally is correct) but in this situation where I was absent at the time it resulted in nobody picking it up and submitting anything, thus missing the deadline for the build.

Anyway, I spent the remaining 2 hours until the extended deadline running around making sure as much of everyone's work was crammed into the build as possible, this includes taking all the whitebox scenes the designers have been doing and placing a controllable player into them, making sure that models like the player model are in the build and visible and then making sure that everything was up to date in that regard and that the player would be able to access all of these in some way with a basic main menu.

The problems I faced mostly consisted of nobody being around. I could barely get into contact with anyone from other departments for ages. This is partly the reason as to why even after the deadline got extended, I was still about 11 minutes late to finishing the build but I did eventually finish it and send it to the POs to submit to our superiors.

Leads meeting

Due to the state of the build there was a clear picture being seen here; progress is too slow. We each looked at the sorts of "blockers" (things from the project that are impeding on our progress). In the case of the programmers, I argued that our blockers was just a combination of motivation and the incident. These were blockers that were affecting me more so than the other programmers, so I figured I may need to reflect on my own motivations for this project and sort myself out there.

Department meeting

The first thing that came up was the topic of the dialogue system. The question was directed at the narrative designer, but I provided the answer of if it was implemented because it was something I was planning to do the night before the meeting, unfortunately, I was working on things up until very late, and ended up falling asleep and forgetting about the dialogue system, but I promised that it would be implemented by the end of the day.

I checked in with the programmers after the designers had checked in with each other Programmer A talked about progress with the DDR mechanic (remember that the department meetings are on a Monday and was thus, before the incident).

Programmer B was working on the other project during this sprint.

In the programming team

For this sprint I assigned myself the following task:

I assigned these tasks to Programmer A:

Before the incident I was working on my task. The main thing I was working on in that regard is a better UI, as this is what we originally were working with:

Whereas this is what I was trying to work on before the incident:

I had also made several adjustments to the code that existed as well as creating some new scripts to go along with it. They're unfinished, but I may as well explain them and may plans for them.

Firstly the BattleSystem script was adjusted to support multiple units from both the player side and the enemy's side:

I also attempted to sort the order of which unit goes in which order based on their agility stat:

This was more or less everything I had managed to implement into the BattleSystem script as at the same time I was working on another script for controlling the UI called BattleUI. Though in this script I had pretty much only been able to write code for Setting the HUD and with loading the Item submenu:

Programmer A's DDR prototype was finished for the build and I am quite impressed with the polish he added to it:

The game will have cubes moving down and once they are colliding with an input object and the player presses one of the bound inputs for the note, it checks their distance relative to the input object and determines whether its a good, great or perfect hit from that. As well as that, with nice looking colours and a particle system when a note is hit, it's obvious that a lot of work was put into it.

The DDR system is accessible in the build by either using the debug scene selection slider to pick the DDR scene, or by going into the movement testing scene and walking over a trigger cube that sends the player to it.

I had not assigned anything to Programmer B for this sprint since I had taken over working on the turn-based system.

Reflection

To say this week was a nightmare would be an understatement. While the beginning of the week was fairly normal, everything had ended up tumbling down very quickly and I think that with the combination of the incident and with admittedly biting off more than I could chew with deciding to rewrite the turn-based system in one week and at this stage of development, there will be some fairly large consequences in the coming weeks.

In thinking of what I can improve for next week, the first thing that comes to mind is improving my schedule for working on projects and generally trying to avoid working late into the night, as one of the reasons that I missed my task deadline was the incident which would have probably been avoided if I both wasn't tired or working that late into the night in the first place.

In regards to the turn based system, I should have either just added onto the existing one that Programmer B made instead of rewriting the entire thing or just sending it back to him to continue working on. There was realistically no reason for me to go back and start it again besides just being short-sighted. This is an aspect of me I will improve on in subsequent weeks.

That's all that I have to share this week. Thank you again for reading and let's have our fingers crossed that next week will be better!