Seams - Week 9

Hello and welcome back to The wonderful world of Seams' development, this week I just barely missed out on my goal of fully finishing level 1's events. Though in other areas of the team progress has been made.

Progress throughout the team

The other programmer has been working on other aspects of the game that aren't my job to do. Most of this involves the nighttime segments of the game, that are meant to take place between all of the puzzles and character interactions. It plays as a stealth segment where the player needs to avoid security guards, and this week enemy paths and the ability for the guards to catch the player were implemented. Have a look at it functioning below:

This week's assignment

This week I got extremely close to finishing the events for day 1 on the first floor. The only thing left to do is a sequence of events for the room inspection, where a character checks the player for any items in their inventory. If the player has these items during the check then their inventory is cleared, otherwise nothing substantial happens. There is meant to be another mechanic to help fight against this that hasn't been fully implemented yet, that being the item storage in the players room.

The player should be able to store a limited amount of items they find, and in this storage they are safe from room inspections. This hasn't been fully implemented yet (A user interface has yet to be created) but an initial script was made a few weeks ago that I believe I never mentioned (although I might've just forgot).

The sequences I mentioned in last week's blog post have also been implemented, in which the player picks a character to interact with, either starts or does their quest, and then is placed into a different event where they go to the visitors room to meet another character and then placed back into the kitchen to continue where they left off.

It's a little non-functional right now as you saw at the end there but once you can actually interact with the character in the visitors room everything should be working there.

Another problem I tackled this week was saving/loading. When I was making the item + quest system I had completely forgotten that ScriptableObjects are non-serializable, meaning that I couldn't save things related to them in the way that I normally do. This unfortunately included Lists that held the objects in them.

My solution to this was to create two new classes; ItemBase, and QuestBase. These contain the exact same parameters as their original counterparts, but as classes they inherit from nothing and are serializable. Then, the lists that contain the player's items and quests were changed to contain those classes. and some code was made to take the data from whichever item/quest is being fetched to convert it into the new class for storing on the player. This then allows them to be saved to a file. If you're still not following too well I made a quick visual to explain it better:

(The same logic applies to quests as well)

Reflection

I got a fair bit more done this week and I'm pretty happy with that, but with our deadlines approaching in the next two weeks and me still being stuck on the first day of the game, I need to consider my options of what to do with my remaining time, as well as address my progress, both the strides I've made and the staggering lack of progress as well. And consider what things may need to be cut down some more so that we can meet our deadline. Ultimately, I want to make sure that I can get everything we originally planned to do working, but with vents and character profiles already being completely cut not potentially being enough, I think that it is still worth having that conversation.

I also need to make sure not to take too many shortcuts with programming scripted sequences. Throughout the last two weeks I had been trying to guess my way through making them and kept the assumption of "if it works there is nothing wrong with it" but this approach will do nothing but cause problems for me in the future. So with that I need to figure out and plan what I'm going to do for these sequences in the second and third day.

This is all that I believe I have to show this week. I'm sad that I couldn't quite finish day 1, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel in that regard and it is very close.