Senior Production
Post XV
This week has been very productive on the programmer front and there’s a little bit to talk about in today’s update. My task over the weekend was to prototype some flashlight functionality. For QA this coming Thursday, we wanted to test a lot of features and one of those are changes to the flash light. Since we aren’t yet sure which system we want to continue with, we have 3 flash lights to test. I’ll go into a bit more detail shortly. We have also planned to test out or newly created Kiosk mode. This will be what you see when you enter the game, with the main menu being displayed in front and it will also be what you return to if you should idle for too long in game. We also have an update light detection system which uses actual lights to determine if you are in the dark or not. Since I didn’t work on the systems other than the flashlight, i’ll focus on them.
The first flashlight we plan to work with is just the flash light we have been using. It is meant to be more of a baseline from which to better gauge the new ones. It currently can be recharged by holding R and that’s is honestly all it does. The rest is automatically taken care of for you. The second flashlight is an improved version of this flashlight. It implements some of the features that the designer intended from the start, but never made it into the build last semester due to time constraints. For starters, it uses an active reload system to recharge the flashlight which currently requires you to enter this reload mode by pressing R (pressing it while in the mode will leave it). While in the reload mode, you have to alternate clicking the left mouse button and the right mouse button to recharge your flashlight. It also has the ability to turn the flashlight on and off with F which is a long needed feature. The last flashlight tries to utilize batteries to achieve a similar goal as the original flashlight. Instead of holding R to recharge it, you press R to consume a battery, automatically recharging your flashlight to full. This means that batteries would need to be placed in the level.
I also spent a bit of time working on an object which will make testing new items easier. It is an item dispenser you can place in the level and it allows you to specify how many to give you and a few other properties. It even lets you tell it what text to display on the object so you can know when you see it. This item is interacted with using our interactable object system so it even highlights when you are looking at it. An example can be seen below.
While this week was pretty good for the programmers (due to our need for features), the following week could prove troublesome. There are plans to implement a monster AI which will keep one of the programmers busy, there is growing concern amongst us that there isn’t enough work to split between the 4 of us. Hopefully we will be proven wrong but it is looking to be problematic. Next week’s focus will likely be on the monster and polishing up some systems like the flashlight further.
This is all I have to talk about this week, but there will be more to talk about next week.
TL;DR:
- Other programmers made a lot of cool things
- I made a lot of flashlight updates
- I created an item dispenser!
- We might not have enough work for 4 people