Log #3: Aug/30/2024

Learning Unreal and realizing that I did not describe the coffee. Telling everyone the clearer demo plan. Makeup entry for Thursday and entry for Friday.

I missed yesterday as I ran behind on some work. Yesterday was a good day though, but it can be hard to feel productive when the task that I can measure, the Unreal Engine tutorial I'm working through, doesn't measure up in a particularly impressive way. I made it to 20 minutes in that tutorial Thursday, but I was working up a little bit better of a groove.

The most significant thing on Thursday, for me anyways, was giving the team a more fleshed out breifing, detailing our game's demo (see devlog #2 if you don't know why that's important). We went through a detailed plan I had drawn out, which listed basically all the mechanics our demo would need. After our meeting, I added a list of everything that needed coded to our Taiga page.

Things went pretty well, though I wasn't sure what to do about items and inventory. After some discussion, I decided to push for a visual inventory menu to show the player what items they had. Other than that, the game would make item use mostly automatic. We'll see how this goes in practice later down the road.

We also had a firedrill yesterday.

On Friday, today, things went almost uneventfully. I worked to the 40 minute mark in my Unreal tutorial, which I feel quite happy about, though I was a little bit unsatisfied because I had to close the project right when I ran into a bug. For some reason, the controllable character will constantly rotate back to its starting position whenever the player causes them to spin, resulting in a weird "clippy" look that shakes the camera around. Oh well, I'll work this out Monday.

Also, I ran into an error message while importing an RBX file into Unreal. I was a bit scared because there was fancy words I was unfamiliar with, but after reading briefly about what an RBX file is, I talked to our teacher, and was relieved to find that I could ignore it unless that file wasn't working properly.

Additionally, I overheard people getting a talk about using other people's work in their games, and how that can get sketchy. Apparently, "free to use" work could really be stolen art, and result in you getting in trouble if you use it in your game. I am not too worried, and would mostly garvitate towards original artwork anyways, but we'll see.

Meanwhile, our coders were messing around with dialogue and interacting with items. Here I realized that the coffee item I envisioned in my head was not what other people seemed to be envisioning. While I imagined a disposable paper cup, I found one of the team's artists working on a mug... Oh well. I'm not sure it's important, or if that model will go into the final game.

I also eavesdropped on our programmers talking with our teacher about file sharing. Apparently, they should not share files with each other, but do everything through GitHub, and not edit the same files at once. Makes sense to avoid confusion, though that management stuff is a little intimidating to me.

The coders made good progress on the demo. There was doors that could be opened and closed, dialogue, and even some messing around with that coffee. It's cool to see mechanics coming to life!

Think that's the big stuff, have a weekend. Bye!

-Luke Knotts