CHECKOUT - Devlog #4

Moving into the last half of the production period, our group has been working towards our goal of having a vertical slice done for the upcoming playtest. For me, this meant integrating the different core systems (Dialogue Handler, NPC Manager and Scanning/Bagging Items) and mechanics to build a strong foundation that easily allows the team to add more content. Numerous setbacks for our group with losing the only other programmer and the cancelled college strike had left the team with low morale in terms of progress, but now we hope to get on track again with things back to normal.

That hasn't been the end of the bad luck for us as the night before our progress meeting, some repository conflicts has lead to some lost progress and required me to look into refactoring the entire system as it stands. A playable demo as the goal and to work towards it, the fundamental mechanics/systems needed to be refactored for scalability and organization. As for the current state of the project, it currently has limited interaction between the dialogue and item scanning system due to the implementation.

Currently, customers just run their dialogue and leave. The items being spawned have no proper logic set up with the dialogue.

After trying to recover as much as I could of the lost changes, I switched my priority to getting as much interaction between the dialogue and NPC managers in to showcase somewhat of the final dialogue system. I spent the last two weeks making adjustments and incorporating the project's system managers together and having most of all that work erased has been a frustrating experience. That being said, I plan on getting the majority of the fundamentals done for the project this week before adding the other features from the backlog in, such as the tip jar and payment prompts.

The first official Dialogue trees and Characters!

As a team, we each created characters with respective dialogues to use as a means of testing the dialogue system in the vertical slice. Each character is premade, though the random NPC generation is still a core feature that has to be implemented at a later time. Just for convenience and the for the sake of saving time, doing premade characters and dialogue would best help us establish the fundamental system.

Ron's Dialogue/Character (Mine)

Rei's Dialogue/Character

Charlotte's Dialogue/Character