Senior Production
Post XVI
This week’s update encapsulates a culmination of work from this week and last week. I decided against posting something last week due to the low volume of work to discuss and show. Since my last post a bit of major changes to the game have been made and i’d like to spend a little bit of time talking about them. A good chunk of the updates weren’t done by me specifically as they were tasked to one of the other 3 programmers in our group.
The first major change is in regards to the monster and how it functions. Previously we were attempting to make the monster something that was very heavily controlled by scripted events and triggers to give the desired effect. This past week we’ve been pushing towards a complete overhaul of this system in favour of a monster which is closer to some of the original ideas proposed last semester. This of course means and AI controlled monster which actually has a physical presence in the level. This has some large implications and we don’t yet know if it will be what we want but I sure hope so. With this also came an update to the light system. The light system now uses the actual lights in the level to determine whether the player is in the dark or not and this has an effect on the behavior of the monster.
We also have been making some major pushes in the code base to refactor some of our blueprint to C++ and improving the usability of various systems to make level creation an easier process. This has been a group effort and has so far had good and bad parts. The good part being that now things have become a bit simpler and less complex due to the move to C++. The bad part is that in the process, there have been conflicts with merges as well as small bugs being introduced. Some of this could have been prevented, but what is done is done and we are addressing the problems which lead to this outcome.
My work this past two weeks has been mostly around the flashlights, refactoring and helping to manage the other programmers. This coming week in particular might have me being a bit busier with the push for the indie game festival this coming Saturday which my group will be presenting our game in. It is a bit scary since so much still needs to get done on the design and art side. I will also be creating a document which will help teach the team members who are struggling to use git in order to prevent some of the problems we encountered this past weekend with merge conflicts.
This is all I have to talk about in this post. Unfortunately this semester has less to talk about in my blog posts due to the separation of a small workload between 4 programmers but hopefully in the near future there will be more interesting topics to cover.
TL;DR:
- Major changes to the monster
- Major changes to the light system
- Huge push to refactor Blueprints into C++
- Lots of merge conflicts this past weekend