Sanctum Infernum - Week 9

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

Hello and welcome back to the devlog for Sanctum Infernum! This is likely going to be one of the most important weeks of the entire project, as well as the most productive, though it wasn't free from some issues either. Without further ado, let's get started!

In the programming team

This week I had a very clear message for the other programmers, "Don't worry about tasks for this week, focus on the other project and I'll take over here" or something along those lines anyway. But basically, I took it upon myself to take over as much as I could for this week, even including some designer tasks. Now was that reckless of me? Yes absolutely. But I had just gotten out of a relative slump that I had been stuck in for the past few weeks and actually felt surprisingly fired up to finish off the project.

With that in mind, I did a little planning, after our meeting on Wednesday to collect feedback on the last build, I started building a list of tasks that needed to be completed to my knowledge, this list ended up increasing periodically when I would either find something new or when someone else did something that required actions from my end.

The colour coding here is pretty simple:

• Green represents a completed task

• Red represents a task I had to quit doing

• Black represents a task I hadn't completed yet but was still working on.

As you can see from the list, I could not get Wwise working in this sprint. I don't entirely understand the details but apparently me working on Wwise was doomed from the beginning and that I should not have been tasked with working on it. That's the gist of it anyway.

Before going through what I made, I'd like to show one last time every task I had assigned myself on Jira:

This also includes some tasks that were originally assigned to designers in which I requested to them if I could take over their programming tasks.

Here is the task that I had assigned to Programmer B for this week:

Going through the tasks, one of the first things I did was redesign the main menu. The new layout is fairly similar to how it was in Seams, but I think it works well for what it is:

Either way I'm quite happy with how the menu looks, it's animated in a similar way to how Seams was and there is a smooth transition between the main menu and settings menu.

When I was told that the designer who was working on in-game UI tasks was finished with it I had a look at what they were doing. They had made their own testing scene for it which looked about like this:

When I tried porting it into the other scenes I immediately starting facing problems. Firstly, the canvas in the test scene clearly didn't have the same settings as the HUD images imported really small:

After resizing the HUD, I also realised that the health bar was seemingly placed incorrectly so I corrected that (notice how its been placed next to the cross now and resized):

After that I realised that some issues had been left in by some designers included melee enemies not being able to damage the player and the UI health bar not actually doing anything. These were changed with some modifications to the code that they had made:

At some point after this, some designers went and changed the appearance of the UI but they ended up messing with my fixes which resulted in me having to do them again.

When I first made the weapon system, you might remember that I made code that gave the player each weapon. I've now changed this by commenting out that code, having the default weapon be the knife, and created an object that gives you the shotgun upon interacting with it to place in the dungeon

Part of the endgame involves arriving back into the slums to fight your way towards the beginning where a teleporter of some kind would take you away. My method of doing this simply involved copying the slums scene and placing a bunch of enemies all around it:

These enemies have an extended FOV so that they can detect you from further away. The slums are a very open environment so if I hadn't done this it would've been far too easy to avoid the enemies.

At the end of the slums I placed an object emitting a light source and a particle system:

I tried to make it look like something the player would want to approach, I think it does a decent job. Going through it takes you back to the main menu, ending the game.

Finally, its time to address the elephant in the room, the slums boss. This boss has been planned for almost since the slums were created. The idea is that you get beaten intentionally to transition the game from the slums to the dungeon.

The boss itself is actually just a powered up regular enemy, it has around 10k health and deals about 60 damage per hit. When you enter its FOV, code runs that displays a health bar for it. At the time of it first being added, the animations for the model weren't functional, so it would do a very odd slide towards you but besides that it worked well.

I had slightly hard coded the transition for being defeated by checking if the boss is trying to attack you and then setting a bool as true if it was, then when you die it would check if that bool is true and if you're in the slums where it would then begin loading the dungeon.

Around this time I also put together a basic game over screen. It was nothing but a black overlay that had "Game Over" in red text that would fade in. After a few seconds you would be sent back to the main menu.

Now back to Wwise. I had mentioned earlier how it didn't work, so what I tried doing instead was port the AudioManager script I had from Seams into the project. Now long story short: it didn't work and at this point I was running out of time to submit the build for the sprint so I uploaded it as it was, which while it had a lot of new content in it, it was still missing the music.

Early on in the week, Programmer B came back with his finished locked door mechanic. It involves being able to place keys down which have a specific flag they can apply to the player, if you approach a door and you don't have that flag enabled then the door wont open, though if you do have it then the door will do an animation in which it moves out of the way. It works and I am satisfied with the results that Programmer B brought.

Leads meeting

Since this was at the beginning of the sprint, I had to explain what I wanted to do with the slums boss, the others didn't quite think I could manage it in time but welcomed me to try.

I also asked the artists about if they could make an actual dialogue box for the game, as for the longest time the dialogue box UI was just a bunch of white boxes. They said they would look into it.

Since right before the meeting I was working on the main menu, I asked the artists if they had a logo for the game and they sent me the logo you see in-game.

Department meeting

After everything I had been working on, I couldn't quite make most of the department meeting and much like with last week it seems like there isn't an accessible recording of it. For the most part though, nothing too substantial had happened in the meeting itself. People were mostly just playing the game and looking for issues, which allowed me to pin down some bugs and fix them in time for the build, but besides that there wasn't too much going on.

Reflection

This week was massive in terms of progress. Like you saw above I had given myself a lot of tasks to do and the fact that I got them all mostly finished has actually made me feel pretty impressed with myself, though I must wonder where this energy was 5 or so weeks ago. Overall, I've managed to somehow make finishing this game look feasible, which I would've thought would be impossible just a few weeks ago.

While the sprints have officially ended with this week. There is still an extra week of the module in which I imagine I will be allowed to finish off everything that I've got going here so I will likely be trying to continue this positive momentum I have brought myself into next week.

That's all I have to show this week, as this is the final official sprint, there likely wont be that much more (besides audio) that needs to be implemented. Regardless, there's still some work to be done so I'll see you soon.