Sanctum Infernum - Week 2

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

Hello again and welcome back to my blog for my current project that is still currently unnamed. A lot of things have been going on everywhere else in the team while the programming department has regrettably not gotten up to much.

Leads meeting

This week's leads meeting brought about discussions about milestones, conduct on our server, a new way of approving changes and plans for integrating Confluence/Jira into our workflow. So lets go through these one at a time.

Firstly, us leads have been tasked with listing out our priorities and goals starting from week 3. It's been emphasised to us how important it is we keep up with these as the weeks go on during development.

Secondly we were made aware of some mild misconduct on our discord server that we use for easily communicating with each other. In the future we will need to do better with communicating with each other politely and appropriately in a business setting.

Next up we decided on a new approval system for everyone to follow that's come about due to communication issues between Guildford and Birmingham. The basic idea is that when someone on the team has a new idea for something they will consult both their Guildford and Birmingham department lead with that idea. After that it is presented to both of the Product Owners. For the idea to be implemented it must require unanimous approval, as in, each lead must approve of it and if it is approved then the rest of the team is made aware of it. Though programmers needing approval for an idea might struggle a lot less as there isn't a Birmingham lead to also need approval from. This also means that any programming related pitch needs my own approval. This is done to help prevent any rando joe from deciding to implement an important game mechanic out of nowhere and will hopefully allow for more leads to be on board with an idea at once.

Lastly, we discussed the integration of a tool called Jira, which is a scrum tool created by Atlassian who also created the Trello software we had been using up until now for both this project and my last one. This is to help create more effective scrum sprints as well as creating a space for us to organise our documents for easy access to everyone via Confluence, which we will also be integrating.

Department meeting

In this meeting the designers were designated tasks by one of their leads. Along with that level designers shared some of the work they had made towards designing a dungeon layout. We also decided on mechanical things like how enemy encounters work (colliding with an enemy object and then transitioning into a battle arena somewhere away from the level itself).

At one point in the meeting the discussion of narrative came about and how it would be implemented. Designers in Birmingham suggested using Fungus, which is a pre-built dialogue system that is admittedly feature rich. I butted into this to mention the dialogue system I already have ready to go from when I made Seams (and while I admit that it doesn't have as many features as Fungus might have, I believe it to be easy to expand upon and to ultimately have more control over as I made it). In the end, a conclusion on what to use was not made but I have a feeling that the Birmingham designers will force Fungus to be used instead later on.

A big topic that came up was that certain Guildford designers were unhappy with the fact that the lead Guildford designer was absent in this week's lead meeting. They feel as if several of the decisions that were made were done without input from Guildford, despite the fact that the Guildford PO, who is also a designer, and myself were present.

There was some more discussion of other mechanics. The DDR mechanic that is used in combat is now tied to an item that acts as a page to a book the main character is given. The player must find the pages to this book in order to perform moves that use the DDR notes.

Me and one of the other programmers had prepared some questions for the designers regarding how the game will work so that we could get a better grasp on what we should be programming and how. This was mostly questions like "Can you fight multiple enemies at once" or other such things. We mostly asked this so that we programmers could have a rough idea on how we should program the systems that the game needs since we didn't have a clear idea on that by this point. With the knowledge we gained from those answers we should have a clearer image to go by when beginning to program the game hopefully next week.

After that, the topic of what Unity version should be used came up and we all decided on using Unity version 2021.3.8f1 though to my knowledge this wasn't the final confirmed decision yet.

We were also given access to Jira this week and some tasks had already been created for some departments to get started on:

(These are all the tasks that were assigned to people this week, I hadn't personally created any yet while I figured out the software)

In the programming team

With us still waiting on the GitHub and Unity project to be sorted, there wasn't much explicit programming being done this week. I'm still mostly waiting for the designers to get what they actually want for this game sorted out as anything I decide to make now would be subject to change. Near the end of the week, I went to my department members and asked them what they're good at programming in order to help decide later what sort of tasks I want them to do.

Programmer A told me about his experience with navmesh and AI programming and after listing out some of the early tasks that may need to be done he suggested maybe doing the battle system as he had been prototyping a camera system for turn based battles.

Programmer B said he was good with using maths, setting up animations and doing UI though I didn't have any lengthy conversations about that as unlike Programmer A he didn't mention working on any prototypes already.

This information was quite handy as it has given me some insights into the sorts of things I should ideally assign everyone in the coming weeks.

I also spent this week working my way around Jira, I didn't personally set any tasks for this week's sprint but instead I spent this time familiarising myself with the workspace it provides so that when the opportunity for us to do tasks begins I will be ready to set everything out for my team.

As for actually getting started, even though the version of Unity to be used had been largely decided AND the GitHub repository had been setup sometime during this week (though it was just an empty repo), the project itself still hadn't been set up and I had once again asked about it only to be left with no definitive answer. This meant that we had gone another week without having a proper workspace in which we could program the game.

Reflection

This week was riddled with arguments and communication issues and quite frankly it was very annoying to have to watch occur. I understand that a lot of these issues are primarily coming from the fact that Guildford and Birmingham have a very large physical separation and the only way we will be able to alleviate this is with consistent, frequent communication between each department over what tasks everyone is doing.

Alongside that, something I noticed is that some Birmingham designers were designated to prototyping certain mechanics and, while this probably happens in a AAA setting (I suppose I don't entirely know), us programmers have had nothing to do yet so I don't see why we couldn't have done any prototyping instead, then again, I didn't actually communicate this thought to the design team and looking back, I feel like I should have. In the coming weeks I will try and make sure I communicate about this confusion and see if I can get some clarity about it.

In the department meeting, the PO had said that they didn't want to overwork the programmers (in response to me suggesting to use my own dialogue or to make another one instead of using Fungus). Seeing as we had literally no work I have a feeling that they don't actually realise either how quickly we as programmers could work on something like dialogue or that we are nowhere near overworked yet.

I'm hoping that by next week either the POs will have the project sorted out properly or they finally let me sort it out because if it was in my control from the beginning I believe we would have already started programming and would have some sort of basic movement prototype already made. This is what I will be aiming for next week.

Regardless of all that, this is all that I have to show this week. Thank you for reading and I hope you continue to follow the development of this project, because it certainly is an interesting one.