Sanctum Infernum - Week 7

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

Hello and welcome back once again to the blog for one of my newest in-development projects. As we near the dreaded deadline for the end of our project, everyone is kicking into gear to make sure that we have something good to show off.

Leads meeting

This leads meeting did not lead to very much due to the fact that there was a lot of absence from the other leads, including one of the product owners and part of the music department.

Due to that we spent most of this meeting just catching up with each other personally after reiterating and clarifying what tasks we have set ourselves and our departments in this sprint.

Department meeting

In this meeting, the designers caught up with each other and presented their work to the design leads and product owners, due to an unforeseen circumstance, I had missed a lot of the earlier parts of this meeting. When I arrived, I caught up with my programming team to see the progress on this weeks tasks.

By the time of the department meeting, Programmer A had almost finished the enemy AI he was working on. He demonstrated enemies being able to follow a pre-set path that can be created by making a set of empty GameObjects.

I checked in with Programmer B and he reported back to me that he was on-schedule to completing his task, after that I similarly reported on my task.

At the time, my task was mostly complete, though I was facing issues with getting the walking and idle animations to play following the correct conditions being met.

The meeting ended shortly after this as there was nothing else to be said.

In the programming team

After a meeting we had at the beginning of this week on Wednesday to catch ourselves up with each other's Jira tasks from last week, I assigned a set of tasks for the three of us to complete before the end of the week.

As well as the image above, here is the task I assigned to myself on Jira:

And here is the task assigned to Programmer B this sprint:

Programmer A was continuing some of his task from last week.

My task was to work with the art team in order to properly implement animations for the player character into the game. After the art lead was done putting the animations in the game, I got to work, he had already worked on the setting things in the animator so it was up to me to sort out the code for it.

It was a little different initially but I made some changes, those changes being some additional transitions and a new set of parameters, and the conditions for transitions. After that I went to a few scripts in order to tell the game when to play the animations.

(PlayerMovement.cs)

The above code is for handling switching between idle and movement animations. It checks to see if the player's horizontal and vertical inputs are different from 0, if either of them are, then the game will activate a parameter on the animator

(PlayerAttack.cs)

This script uses a coroutine in order to time setting a parameter for the animator after the player fires or uses their weapon. It is set to wait for the length of time that the animation itself is so that all attacking animations don't get cut off without having to hard code each time.

(Weapon.cs)

This switch statement will check the type of weapon your currently equipped weapon is, it changes the animator parameters for checking which type of weapon is equipped so that it seamlessly changes.

Elsewhere in the programming team One of the programmers continued with creating enemy AI. In the games current state, the two types of enemy function to a degree, with ranged enemies being able to throw a projectile at the player, and melee enemies chasing the player when in their sights. There is also a system in which the enemies can follow a path, although a path wasn't made in the main scene that enemies are placed in within the build.

Elsewhere, I tasked the other other programmer with making code for an enemy spawner that could be activated after specific events so that waves of enemies can spawn in an arena. Though by the time the build for this week was made we didn't have time to properly implement it into the map.

Programmer B had created some classes that allow for an object to be able to spawn enemies in waves. He created a wave class that has specific parameters like the enemy type, and the time it takes to spawn them. It then has a class that stores an array of those waves and can be placed on a GameObject.

Besides that, some designers had some programming tasks as well, primarily sorting out the animations for the enemies in a similar matter to how I sorted out player animations.

Reflection

This week was quite productive, we were able to finish our assignments without missing our deadlines this time and it feels like a game is actually taking some sort of shape now, it is important to make sure that this momentum can continue into the next sprint by consistently working and assigning tasks that are feasible for us to achieve.

It is important for me to remember to make notes on things that happen throughout the week, as relying on my memory to be able to accurately recount everything for this blog, as I've found out recently, is a bad idea. From next week forward I plan to do better in this regard.

That is all I have to show for this week, thank you again for keeping up with the development of this project and I'll see you next week.