Final Devlog

Final Devlog 

Content -

• What I Topics Covered
• Team management
• Problems and Corrections
• What I learned and Will Do Different

What I Topics Covered

During the trimester I covered a lot of features from game mechanics, sfx, vfx, dialogue, quests, level design project management and User Interface. 

Team management

This trimester was the first time working in a team and it was difficult at first as getting to know everyone. The team meetings helped to understand people's strengths and weaknesses. The team was very active on discord and we shared files and information to add to the project. I was the Lead developer of the project and kept everyone informed of the current state of the game. I created the online Miro ideation board for both art students and programmers students could add ideas to. This helps a lot to see peoples vision and the direction the game is going in. I made notes in the meetings of what was discussed. This helped me with the decision to take on item placement and game mechanics to put into the game. In the beginning all the developers knew what they wanted to design for the project. The Gannt charts helped a lot with structuring the tasks for the developers and we all knew from it what people were working on that week. I made a gantt chart on miro for all the programmer team to access. The Art team had their own and let us know in the meets on their current tasks

Problems and Corrections

There were problems throughout development in this trimester. There were experience and knowledge problems when trying to implement a system you have never done before. With time and support from other members we managed to solve the problems. I had delays in decision making by other team members when I put my idea forward and I wanted to get their feedback so I can proceed. Towards the last half of the trimester the communication speed improved.

I followed youtube videos for most of the systems and somewhere failed or did not provide assets such as models and animations. So I was lucky I had a lot of epic game marketplace assets from the last 2 years of free assets a month. I knew it won't be the same as the video but some turned out better. Some videos I used were from different unreal versions and they gave errors in the blueprints. Lucky enough the errors told me the problems and I sorted them out. 

I had problems with the art students' models with collisions stopping the player from entering their buildings and when scaling the model up to size the textures stretched badly. I told the art students the problem and they helped me with the collision setting and it worked. I do currently have problems with github as I am still figuring out how to separate my files to upload as the files are too big to upload.

I had problems with some values not outputting the value I expected. I decided to start from the beginning of the call for the event or function and use print string in the execution line through it all until I find out where the value is outputting not to my expectation. These techniques worked a lot.

At the end of week 12 in this  trimester I had problems with packaging my project. I had errors and got rid of them by following the messages and sometimes copying and pasting them into google and looking them up in the forum online. They helped alot and I ended up with a few warnings and no errors. The game packaged but the build executable file didnt work. It displayed filename to long. The warnings gave me a clue and I decided to look where the warnings keyword gameplay tags. I went to the project settings and turned off the import gameplay tags checkbox. I done another package and it work. I was relieved and so was the team.

What I learned and Will Do Different

I learned that I should perfect my systems to where I have no bugs before going on to a new system. I will test more often and to practise the project more to see errors early and get rid of them. Otherwise they will accumulate more and make it more difficult to debug. I took on a lot of tasks that I could have given to the other programmers and focused on perfecting what I was currently working on.

Im definetly going to package more often or cook the project to make sure there are no errors. This will not put to much pressure on me at the end when preparing to package game.

I will update and communicate with the team more often to check if they are ok and if they need support. I did not get everyone to test the game in every meeting to show the current state of the project. I was the main person who was assembling the project and I could have got more ideas towards the direction of the project. 

I am going to balance all the systems in the next project as I spent too much time on game mechanics and less on level design , UI, sound and visual effects.