Senior Production
Post XX
Recently I have been swamped with work between deadlines at work, deadlines in production and my already busy schedule. But in this madness, some good progress has come for the game. Last time I talked about the Breaker Box system for the game and some of the things I had done for it. But the biggest problem this had was that it was all visual and was not in any way functional as a system. After some complications with integrating it with the circuit system we have, the Breaker Box is finally in a completed state. This isn’t the only thing I’ve done though. I’ve also spent time making builds, bug fixing and polishing features.
The Breaker Box system was much larger than I had originally anticipated it to be. It also to some extent slowed down our progress a little bit which is unfortunate. But now that it is fully functional, it gives our designers the ability to fully implement our levels. So what does this functionality include? I think this GIF will be able to show it first and then i’ll explain what happened. (Please excuse the terrible GIF quality, i’m bad at making these)
What you’ll notice is a few things. First, when you interact with the breaker box, the door animates open and you can see a light turn on. Then you can also notice that the mouse cursor appears, indicating that the controls have switched to mouse controls unlike the normal controls seen in the game. When i mouse over switches, they highlight and clicking on them flips them on/off. You can also see that when I flip the top switch on the first time, it turns off all the switches. This is showing what happens when the circuit is overloaded by too many things being on. Then when I flip the switch again, you can see the gate in the background starting to lift. When i toggle it back, the gate drops because the power has died. Finally you can see the door closing and the light turning off as the controls go back to their previous state. During this whole process of interacting with a breaker box, you can’t move and your camera is stationary. It might not seem like a lot, but this is a fairly large system which was nearly more trouble that it was worth due to the circuit system and its “problems”.
Beyond the Breaker Box which is finally complete, I also spent time doing bug fixes and polishing features. Since we’ve been doing a lot of crunch lately to meet our upcoming deadline of April 25 (when the final build is due), I’ve been making a lot of builds for QA and class. Unfortunately, due to our workflow, we don’t have an easy way to do something like continuous integration or even setting up a build server to handle it for us. This means I’ve got to do it manually each time. And since it would be too easy for things to work on their own, the build always has problems which I need to fix before I can release it to the team. Most of the time, they tend to be bugs which crash the game, but sometimes its because a feature isn’t working as intended or because its just completely missing for some reason. This is probably my least favorite part about working on this project, but it is necessary and helps move our game forward.
I mentioned in the previous paragraph the deadline of April 25. This deadline is when our class requires us to have a final, stable and complete build of our game. What this means for us as a team is that we have roughly 3 weeks to make sure that everything is in, working and feels good. This isn’t really a lot of time, especially since we only just recently became feature complete (our narrative, art and audio isn’t even all in yet!). It is going to be a long crunch these next three weeks and all of us can feel it. The good news is though that once that day hits, we are free from the crunch and will have a few days to relax from the pressure before the senior show which is on the 29th.
This is all I will be talking about in this post. I will probably be making only 1 or 2 more updates before the 25th depending on what gets done by me and how busy I am. This will all be followed by a post mortem after everything is over, including the senior show.
TL;DR:
- Breaker Box is done
- Fixed bugs and made builds
- Lots of crunching…
- Deadline is in 3 weeks