Log #7: Sep/9/2024

• Continuing to learn Unreal Engine
• Discussing our project's art style
• Being confused by project management software
• Realizing how much more game design needs to be done

Today I mostly tried to solidify some design work, continued my Unreal tutorial, and supervised the rest of the team. Our team is using Taiga to manage everything, and I began to realize how disorganized everythign is, and how little I understand the capabilities of the software.

On Taiga I created an "epic" and began sorting all of the tasks from the 'demo' phase of our project into an epic called "DEMO" and another epic called "DEMO (details)". Having a way to sort all of the tasks for the demo is super nice, but our Taiga page is still pretty disorganized. I should take some time to understand the "scrum" format, and the other things on Taiga.

Trying to more clearly organize the tasks for the game led me to realize that my designs have not been thought out enough to clearly translate into tasks for everyone to work on. I began drawing out a simple flowchart of the actions the player the could make, and how different mechanics stemmed out from the player's acitons on a piece of paper. I realized that A), I wanted good flowchart software to use, and B), there were lots of things I had not planned out in a concrete way. After talking to our teacher, I think I am going to use Miro.com, because it sounds like it offers a free flowchart software.

I also spent time talking to one of the team's artists about the game's style. Since I do not have a strict style I want to adhere to, I have been trying to get the artists' feedback about what they believe they could execute. We were talking about how realistic the character designs should be. Their opinion was that having a person whose mouth did not move while they were talking would be weird. I do not think this would be much of a problem and we agreed to go for a simplified design with a stationary mouth. It seems like animating a moving mouth would be a lot of extra work, so we're hoping that having stationary mouths will not look too weird.

Throughout the day, I spent a good amount of time reviewing other people's work, and watching progress get made. It is super cool to see! Progress is going smoothly enough, but I really need to organize my designs and make clearer documentation, or things will just get messier and more confusing.

I spent a good amount of time today working through the Unreal Engine tutorial. I found myself stumped on why I couldn't get my AI controller to work, but after getting help from one of our programmers, they showed that the coordinates I was trying to move the NPC to were not accessible, and so the program wasn't working. After putting in accessible coordinates, the AI controller worked successfully, and I thanked our programmer. I continued more through the tutorial, and was able to change the color of the NPCs. Awesome!

It's exciting to see all the progress that is being made, but I am continually reminded of the work I have to do, and how much further our game has to travel to see anything resembling completion. Wish us luck!

-Luke Knotts