Sprint 2 Work begins & Initial struggles
Lets talk: The State of!
Work is fully underway and full refactoring underway, my goal this week will be to work on the weapon system, making that ready to go and fixing the AI to a state where that can be fully modified by me. Other goals will be to create ground work for future AI by having meetings about what direction we want to take the AI, and how we want it used. We will also discuss the boss, and how to best create a satisfying conclusion to the game's story mode.
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Issues that will need to be addressed are existing bugs and unnecessary code, as well decoupling which takes a bit of time (We will talk later about the decoupling). My Goal for this week will be to create an easily used weapon upgrade system, as well as modular AI that allows both me and my designers flexible use of these systems.
Lets talk: Whats Been Done! (Weapons)
The first task on my plate this week was meeting with the designers for the weapons strike team and worked with them on implementing a workable weapon system. In this meeting we refactored all of the weapons code to make it quick and easy to prototype upgrades as well as separate and decouple one gun from the other. The meeting took longer than expected because of coupling, but they now have a pretty simple way to implement prototypes for the upgrades and weapons themselves.
Lets talk: Whats Been Done! (AI Meetings)
There were two AI meetings, one where we discuses regular enemies, and how they would work and another where we discussed the boss.
The regular enemy meeting went smoothly and we solidified our concepts of all the enemies we now have a full roster of: Drifter, Strider, Brutalizer, Impeder, Ranger, and Lurker. These enemies should provide our player with enough variety to challenge and overcome. We also discussed in what order the enemies would be revealed.
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The boss meeting was similarly smooth, until we came to discussing how the final phase would work. The first phase will start with him as a DJ playing the songs from the past levels, throwing out environmental attacks, as well as occasionally throwing out records. The objective of this phase would be to destroy his booth.
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The second phase was where we ran into trouble. We couldn't agree for a while on how we wanted the enemy to attack. at first we wanted him to use his sticks to directly attack the player, and then we wanted him to be able to destroy spawners and summon swarms of enemies like that. We finally decided on spectral drums that have a variety of attacks and ability to spawn a few enemies.
Lets talk: What I Did! (AI)
This week was a learning week about not only why coupling is bad, but why it can take a three hour task and make it a twelve hour one. While I am confident in my abilities to make a simple state machine for the enemies, I underestimated how difficult it would be to deal with decoupling. Right now the way things work with spawning is impeding my ability to get the AI done and tested, and since I didn't have spawning updates planned for this week I found myself with not enough time. Fortunately, I will have a meeting the first day of this upcoming sprint to fix and change the spawning system to be uncoupled with the AI itself.
Phrase of the Week!
I now know why my 100 & 200 course level teachers warned me about coupling.