10/22-11/4: Various Changes and Youmacon
I’ve had a lot of progress over the past three weeks. Here are my updates:
Codex Refactor (8 hours)
The bulk of my feature implementation work was spent on the Codex. The Codex is the game’s encyclopedia (similar to Wargroove). It enables players to have one source of reference for the game’s mechanics, lore, and characters. While we will also have a tutorial, complex strategy games benefit from a well designed encyclopedia.
New features to the Codex includes:
Revamped Categorization: While the Codex had categorization in some capacity, the categories system was not scalable (i.e. they were hardcoded in the game rather than implemented in a flexible way). I had to refactor the categorization, which was a very heavy refactor. There’s now a difference between a Codex entry’s category (e.g. lore, characters, mechanics, units) and its type (e.g. regular, unit, terrain). An entry’s category determines which subheader it goes to, while an entry’s type determines what pages get shown. The two were treated as the same in the old codebase, but now are different in the new codebase.
Damage Matrix: Players need to know how much damage a Unit will do to another unit. Thus, all the unit pages contain a Damage Matrix, a list of all the units and what damages they give and receive. This involved added a method to the battle system to calculate damage on UnitTypes (the scriptable objects) rather than the Unit prefabs themselves.
Terrain Matrix: Players also need to know what units can move onto which tiles, and what the cost is for each tile. Thus, the Terrain Matrix gives players this information.
Codex Searching: In addition to navigating the Codex through the menus, it is nice to give players the option to navigate through a search bar. This feature is rare in codexes, but when it is implemented, it gives players a better user experience. I made a very simple search engine that searches through all the entries based on their title and internal text.
Repository Management (5 hours)
I spent a lot of my time on maintaining the repository, which involves merging pull requests, fixing Merge Conflicts and hotfixing the build when needed. I merged in 52 pull requests this sprint (audio not included, as Daniel does most of that), which is the same count as the previous two week period. Much of my time was spent on solving merge conflicts, of which there were only a lot (I counted 9-10); These merge conflicts were complicated, as they would involve complex features that change and add elements to prefabs and scenes. Solving these conflicts involved advanced techniques, such as using transfer prefabs. Overall, the negative impact of merge conflicts on the team were mitigated.
In addition to merging and solving conflicts, I spent a lot of time providing my programmers with good feedback on their code. Code reviews and feedback structures are important in general because they ensure the quality of a codebase. I make sure that their code most likely work and ensure that I give actionable feedback that makes a difference without being pedantic.
Meetings & Office Hours (5 hours)
A lot of my time this week has been spent in meetings. There are a few types of meetings:
The Weekly “All Hands” meeting: This is where every programmer is required to come every week to meet with their squads and then meet with me to discuss their tasks for the week. These meetings can go on for two hours, as there are a lot of things to discuss and the teams are large. During these meetings, I go through my members one by one, discuss what they talked about in their squad meetings, and ensure they have good tasks.
Office Hours: These are a type of optional, opt-in work sessions that I host once a week for an hour. These are places where programmers can go to get help or work collaboratively. Only a few programmers have taken advantage of this, and I hope more do. This time is mostly used by artists and audio people to ask me questions and talk to me about potential plans.
Leadership Meetings: This is where leadership meets to discuss the state of the project. While these generally overlap the “All Hands” meeting, they did not this week. This is because, although Programming and Design are generally on track, there is a lot of art integration work that needs to get done that hasn’t been done. As a result, the leads meetings took longer than expected.