CHECKOUT - Devlog #3

CHECKOUT - PRODUCTION DEVLOG #3

Coming off of design week and reading week, a lot has happened with our group since. Most notably, the other programmer, Karr, has unfortunately had to withdraw from the program due to personal matters, leaving me as the sole programmer and audio designer. With all of these setbacks and with the impending college strike taking place, this left our group with the issue of determining the direction of the production.

As a team, we met with Karr to discuss what tasks and features from his end had to be passed on to me, as well as the new direction our team. Collaboratively, we looked to set a playable demo as our goal and to work towards setting up the fundamental mechanics/systems needed for it to work. On my end, that means completing Karr's semester-load of work, on top of all of my other responsibilities.

The past two weeks have been spent creating and then refactoring the customer and dialogue system from scratch. After putting together a base in Unity for how customers were to be handled, I spent the next two weeks making adjustments and fitting the different system managers together in the project.

The Code Structure of the 'Customer' Class

Customers have been coded with scalability and organization in mind, as I am the only programmer on the project now, I want to ensure that my group mates, who are not programmers, can easily understand exactly how everything works.

The NPC Manager and How Random Generation Works

As laid out in this diagram, I have reconstructed the NPC generation system completely from the ground up.

Dialogue Test Playtest - Bug
After conducting our most recent round of playtests with the new systems, many testers found this crucial bug that stops the progress of the current dialogue.

Dialogue Refactoring and Fixes

I then spent the next week refactoring the entire Dialogue Handling and produce a fix! Now, we are able to integrate all of the core components into a playable demo which we hope to complete by next week.