Sanctum Infernum - Week 6

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

Hello again and welcome back to my blog on the development of our currently unnamed AAA styled game project. This week, we underwent a massive change, had everyone adjusting to said changes and at the same time I produced something handy for the designers.

Major gameplay changes

On the first day of the sprint (Wednesday) we had a meeting with some higher ups about our progress so far. With how last week went being put into consideration, they were not very happy with how things are going right now and demanded some change.

Now this meeting wasn't recorded, so I can't recall all the details for everything, but the main takeaway from that meeting is that we are now making the game an action third person shooter instead of a turn-based RPG. So with that in mind, many designers work has been pointless and all the coding done for the battle system and DDR are now to be removed from the game.

As well as this, because of our general slowness with these tasks on the programming team, the higher ups and the team over at Birmingham convinced me to allow designers to be assigned programming tasks. So now that this is a thing that is happening I have a few predictions for how this is going to go:

• Designers will be assigned tasks they don't know how to do and will ask us to do it for them anyway.

• Even if the designer does do the task it will be so terrible that either I'll make it from scratch or I'll have to fix it as it wont work

• The designers will be assigned tasks that overlap with what we programmers are doing, essentially making the same thing a second time but worse.

We'll see if these predictions come true in the coming weeks, for now I'll be monitoring closely the code that these designers produce.

Naturally it is very frustrating having to deal with this, but at the end of the day we need to make a game by a certain time point. Some of this will make things easier, hopefully.

Leads meeting

There wasn't much of significance that happened in this meeting. Around this time the Birmingham product owner was on an authorised absence due to personal issues, so we mostly just caught up and agreed to step up on creating more tasks for people since we were behind schedule.

Department meeting

Admittedly I was late attending this meeting so I missed a lot of the earlier parts of it, since it was recorded however, I was able to gain some information.

In this meeting, the designers showed the team a demonstration of a health system. Unfortunately for them, they had a miscommunication and thus the Birmingham designer that made it created the whole thing in Playmaker, meaning it wont actually be in the game and someone else will need to make the system again with code.

Since I was still absent, the Birmingham design lead checked in with the programmers, he asked Programmer A how he was doing with the task of AI enemies, to which Programmer A explained that he was currently sorting out the pathfinding and defining different enemy types. He expected those to be done by the end of the day.

The Birmingham design lead asked Programmer B about his UI tasks who confirmed that he had done a loading screen and has created new buttons for the main menu but hasn't finished a pause and settings menu yet.

An interesting point to mention that I learnt from this meeting is that a designer was given the task of making a shotgun weapon. This is a direct conflict with me giving myself the task of making an entire weapon system, which includes a shotgun type weapon. I would have pointed this out had I been there but unfortunately I was late and didn't realise it had happened by the time I joined.

I joined the meeting in around the last 5 minutes of it, so there wasn't much time for me to personally catch up on what had happened though the Birmingham design lead sent me the notes he made, which includes the notes from the programmers too so I could make do with that.

In the programming team

This week, I had to dish out a whole new set of tasks for us, but before all that, I needed to make sure the dialogue system is up and running for the narrative designer who has been undeservingly patient with me.

There isn't anything specifically special about this dialogue system, it is the exact same one from Seams, just ported into a new game. That being said I did need to change some code regarding the input system since it was different previously, I also changed how it works in regards to audio. I got rid of the whole 'taking a group of samples and randomly playing them as it types the dialogue' to replace it with the ability to just play a single audio clip, as it is to my understanding that there may be voice acting in the game.

After I doing that, I created a decently sized guide for the designers to follow that tells them exactly how the system works and how they can use it to create dialogue for the game. It covers all aspects of the system including how to use events and overall, I'm pretty happy with it. I'll share some snippets of it here but the full thing is on Confluence.

Now that the dialogue is sorted, I could focus on the actual task at hand.

After the meeting in which everything was changed, I huddled up the other two programmers and got talking on where we should go from here. After some discussion over what needed to be done this week and who would be the most able to do each task, this is what we came up with:

In the end, these ended up being all of the tasks I assigned myself on Jira this sprint:

Then there's all of the tasks I assigned to Programmer A this sprint:

And finally, all of the tasks I assigned to Programmer B this sprint:

Well that was the original plan anyway, I sent the image above into the discord server mostly as a way to remind myself to put the tasks onto Jira when I got the opportunity but also so that designers knew what we would be doing in the event that they would've been assigned something similar. Because of this, I was contacted by the Birmingham design lead asking me to give the UI tasks that I had just assigned to Programmer B to one of his designers.

After a little discussion about it, I compromised by giving the tasks under the "In-game UI" section to them.

Onto my weapon system, since some of the weapon types the designers wanted included guns, I sought to save some time by porting the weapon system from one of my recent projects, Project FishFinger. I did have to make a few changes to the system, such as opting to use projectiles instead of a raycast for dealing damage, but overall the scripts ported over without too much issue, allowing me to make the necessary changes for this game.

The main part of the weapon system is the weapons themselves. I created a ScriptableObject called WeaponData which is what stores the most important elements for making a weapon function. This primarily includes the weapon's stats like how many projectiles are spawned, how long the projectile exists for, the fire rate, and the damage per projectile to name a few.

There is also an enum called WeaponType, which is used for defining how the weapon will behave with its stats. There are three types to work with: RANGED_BURST, RANGED_SINGLE_SHOT and MELEE. RANGED_BURST is what defines the shotgun type and will function by spawning the amount of projectiles defined by the projectilesPerShot variable. RANGED_SINGLE_SHOT will always shoot one projectile no matter what, so it can be used for something like fireball spells or throwing knives. MELEE functions a little differently as it essentially just makes a hitbox in front of the player model activate, though it still uses the damagePerProjectile variable to define its damage, it doesn't use most of the parameters that the other weapons use.

For the next prototype, I created a list that stores all three of the weapons I made so that the main script controlling the actual weapon interactions can switch between which weapon is currently equipped:

Reflection

This week brought about the consequences of last week and then some. Naturally I'm quite frustrated about things going in the complete opposite way than I would like for them to but at the end of the day I just need to move on and plan for what is essentially a brand new game. I will make sure that this time around me and the rest of the programming team will consistently finish tasks each week.

I also need to step up my game with attending the department meeting as I was significantly late to this one and had evidently missed a fair bit of important information. Department meetings start quite early on a Monday morning so part of this means me just getting a better sleep schedule

I may also need to start double checking tasks from designers doing programming tasks. These get set by the lead designers and have so far not gone through my own approval at all. I either need to point out to them that we need a better system for this, or I need to start checking the tasks once they've been assigned and see if they overlap with anything else.

Overall though, that is all I have to show for this week. Thank you once again for following the development of this hellhole of a game, it can only go up from here I think.