10/17-10/31: Keeping Momentum
I’ve had a lot of progress over the past two weeks. Here are my updates:
Narrative System & Integration (4 hours)
I spent a lot of time working on the narrative section of the game. Our game is one of the only tower defense games with an actual story, which is conveyed through a visual novel system. I created a system that allows a visual novel cutscene to play out. In addition, I integrated the opening cutscene into the game using my system. By doing this, I realized my system was really clunky and requires far more effort than it actually needed to. I think in the future I might create a better editor for this visual novel system, such as a dialogue graph.
Tower Upgrades (3 hours)
In addition, I spent time creating a system for tower upgrades. Each upgrade class inherits from TowerUpgrade, and does a specific thing to the tower GameObject. This makes making an upgrade simply a few lines. I made 6 different upgrade classes, including:
DamageUpgrade for upgrading the damage of projectiles
FireRateUpgrade for shooting towers
NumShotsUpgrade for the Area tower
ProjectileSpeedUpgrade for upgrading the speed of projectiles
RangeUpgrade for upgrading the range of towers
SeeHiddenEnemiesUpgrade for allowing towers to see hidden enemies
However, Unity (to my knowledge) cannot properly serialize polymorphic classes to the inspector (and to be fair, neither can my custom engine), so I had to make an editor script in order to edit them in the inspector. In the end, the tower upgrades could be edited and adjusted in the inspector.
Support Tower (1.5 hours)
I also spent some time implementing the support tower, the final tower of the game. This tower applies specific upgrades to all towers in range, both when it is placed and when other towers are placed around it. Currently, it just applies a SeeHiddenEnemiesUpgrade to the towers in range, but it will apply more in the future.
Project Management (3.5 hours)
A lot of my time was spent on managing the programmers and the project. These responsibilities include:
Make JIRA tasks for programmers and designers based on playtesting feedback. Many programmers said my method of making tasks with a HELPFUL LINKS section and a POSSIBLE IMPLEMENTATION section assisted them in their task (this is blatantly inspired by Austin Yarger’s teaching techniques, I’m sure he won’t mind). I created their tasks with these sections (at least where applicable).
Reviewing and merging pull requests. This can be time consuming because we’ve had some bad merge conflicts due to poor coordination. Using techniques that previous programming leads have taught me, I was able to navigate them and find ways to merge them in while keeping most of their work.
Checking in with members and assisting them with implementation. This mainly involves answering their questions about how the code works.
