Log #8: Sep/12/2024

• Finishing my Unreal Engine tutorial
• GitHub desecration
• Creating a flowchart of our project's DEMO
• Practicing game design
• Makeup entry for Tuesday and Wednsday, entry for today

I was not as successful concerning writing on this blog as frequently as I intended, but thankfully I only claimed that this was a weekly blog on the home page. Despite not writing blogs for the last two days, I did improve some of this website's visuals, making it format better on phones.

To pick up where I left off on Monday, I made an account on Miro.com that night, and was working on getting a flowchart of all of the interacting mechanics that our team needed to make for the DEMO phase of our project. I spent time two days ago doing that, and I also continued the Unreal Engine tutorial, making extremely good progress. This morning, after continual work through the last two days, I completed the tutorial, and without any big hick-ups along the way either.

But two days ago, when I was still working on the DEMO flowchart, I was worried about how to communicate my ideas clearly to the programmers. I used Taiga to manage the team's tasks, and felt sligtly disoriented, but things went smoothly enough that day. Our artists were working on a door and a human charcter blank (a base model to be used for other, actual characters), and the programmers were chipping away at the gravity mechanic, form interaction, and NPC interactions.

I believe it was the same day when, at one point, our teacher brought our team together to check in on our progress. Our teacher brought up our failure to put everything on our Taiga page, but also mentioned that it was not necessary because we were such a small team, but we should pick one or another. Additionally, they told us about issues, a feature on project management platforms where people can pose problems they run into without having to interrupt people for them to eventually get to it.

The use of issues is to prevent something called "randomization", which is when someone is interrupted because of another issue, causing whoever was interrupt to loose track of what they were doing, and not get it done because they spend time working on that issue. Using issues that we all routinely check should help us keep on our individual tasks, and keep us organized. I do not think we are very good about using them yet, but if we try, we'll surely get better.

The first issue I added to our Taiga page was a GitHub conflict we ran into. Because one of our programmers was not with us Monday, we ended up working on the files the programmer had been messing with, which resulted in nasty conflicts that had to be manually sorted out the next day. This was a pain, and I think it is part of why we did not have a functioning DEMO by today, as initially (and ambitiously) hoped.

Yesterday the designers had their special work, so we spent time analysing the power during the meals in chapter 34 of the book Moby Dick. We also got to pick out "design cards" in a partially random way, of elements that we were to put in our games. For next week, we're supposed to present to the rest of the designers how we implemented, or plan to implement, such elements.

We were also supposed to review each other's practice design documents, but I missed most of that meeting because I did not hear our teacher calling all the designers in. It does not sound like I missed too much, but it was also a slight scare. My design documentation was not in a shareable format, and was hardly anything ready for peer review. In other words, I had slacked off on the practice design documentation, and was afraid that my shortcoming would be exposed. But they were not, at least publically, and the next day I spent time working on the documentation. Today I finally submitted my design documentation, but it was late. I'm a bit embarrassed. I do not want to let myself fall behind; these projects are super helpful, so I do not want to make less of them.

I had finished the DEMO flowchart yesterday, and I put a link to it on the Taiga. I think it makes things a lot clearer, but it also has brought up how many mechanics are needed to make the DEMO work how I've been planning it to.

Today finished the last few minutes of the Unreal Engine tutorial I was working through, and spent time designing features that would be needed after the game's DEMO. The reason for this is, since the coders cannot work on the same files at once, some of the programmers could not work on the next DEMO features while another was using that file. Because of this, I began writing out features for a PHASE 2, which the other programmers began working on. It feels a bit premature, but I guess it doesn't hurt to work on (and it's also good for me to start planning further ahead).

I also pulled our project from GitHub and began experimenting with how to mess with level design, learning how to snap walls into orderly positions and just trying to see what I could do. I read some breif documentation on Unreal, most of which I had already learned from my tutorial, but I still feel uncomfortable using Unreal's tools. I suppose some of the ease will come with experience.

I think those are the highlights for the past few days. I struggle to remember exactly when everything happened, so I could be wrong, but I think this is all correct. As always, it looks like I've got my work cut out for me.

-Luke Knotts