Sanctum Infernum - Week 8

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

Hello again and welcome back to the blog for Sanctum Infernum! Yeah that's right, we have a name now thanks to the narrative designer and its not gonna change anytime soon since no one else has any better ideas.

Leads meeting

The leads meeting went about pretty normally with nothing too much of significance happening. People had seen that various pages on Confluence needed updating but the was a somewhat important topic that hadn't really been handled before. Audio... More specifically, implementing Wwise into Unity.

In case you don't know, Wwise is a middleware program that helps with implementing audio into games, it is supposed to be a better solution but from what I had heard from others it is a nightmare to use, so I was a little apprehensive. Nevertheless, the team wanted me to have a look at implementing it as they think it may require some programming. It was then planned that I would join the Audio teams next department meeting to help discuss it with the rest of them.

Department meeting (featuring Audio)

Unfortunately, I am unable to find recordings for either the design/programming meeting or the audio meeting and I was late to the meeting again, so we're going to have to rely on my very much unreliable memory for what happened in this meeting.

Designers were doing their usual, though nowadays that also includes discussion on their programming tasks, It was this week in which the designer I had given the UI tasks to had finally finished the in-game UI.

As well as that, there was discussion on the endgame, in which a boss was an ambition but not a requirement, as long as the player went back out through the slums and escaped at the end. I took note of this as I figured that it could be something I could try making in one of the remaining sprints.

Around when I arrived it was time to enter the audio meeting. We talked for a little bit and it was decided that I would work together with the Guildford audio lead in order to try and implement Wwise into the game during the next sprint.

In the programming team

This week started with me just making small patches for the game when people from design specifically requested it. You see, this week us programmers had decided to dedicate it to working on our other project, as it was being neglected by the seemingly endless amount of work that comes from having to make this project. Which means that we didn't formally create any Jira tasks (though looking back in hindsight, I probably should have created tasks based on the bugs I was fixing).

That doesn't mean nothing else happened though. On the side I was working on polishing the shotgun by adjusting its projectiles and stats, adding in a proper loading manager (which admittedly was just ported from Seams again) and fixing bugs that had become prevalent in playtests. One such bug that proved particularly challenging for me to fix was a bug related to the weapon system.

This bug took me almost the entire week to fix. The basic gist of what was happening was that when the player entered the dungeon from the slums, the weapon system would just no longer work for some reason, HOWEVER, if the player loaded directly into the dungeon scene from the unity editor or the main menu, it would work like normal for some reason.

The error it produced made even less sense:

The object it was referring to is never actually destroyed and testing with Debug.Log() even confirmed that theory but for some god forsaken reason this error kept popping up. I tried all sorts of things in order to get things working again, including whatever the hell this code was in the weapon.cs script:

This didn't even fix the issue, it seemed like it did initially so I pushed it thinking a job well done, but then a few days later people reported that the bug was still there!

In the end, it was the addition of an if statement in this snippet of the code that fixed things for some reason:

This bug has taken the life out of me at this point, so even if I still don't understand it, I'm just glad that its's gone and I hopefully never have to see it again.

Around the time that the build needed to be made I unfortunately wasn't going to be around due to an important personal matter so I enacted Programmer A as an interim programming lead to sort out the build to be submitted later that evening. I can't say what the process was like for making that build in its entirety because of that absence, but by the time I came back, the build that was a bit too buggy for my liking. Since there was some time left, I applied some fixes to the issues people were mainly facing and managed to upload a slightly improved build before the deadline.

Reflection

This week I was left somewhat satisfied, with the most substantial amount of activity coming from me trying to fix an annoying bug, fixing up the build and then joining the audio meeting. I'm honestly not too sure how to feel about it as it feels like I should be doing more, but at the same time, it was like this in the first place because us programmers decided to spend some time catching up on our other project and I don't think that was a bad thing at all.

Next week is expected to be a pretty big week so I am most likely going to be doing a lot of work, and putting in a lot of effort so that it will all be done on time. But primarily I will want to make sure that I am properly using Jira still, as this week I more or less forgot about it.

Anyway, there isn't anything else I can show this week (or rather, recall there being) so I will bid you farewell, next week will be the final official sprint so there is likely going to be significantly more going on. So I will see you then.