9/18-10/2: Starting the New Project
I’ve had a lot of progress over the past two weeks. Here are my updates
Encounters System (6 hours)
A lot of my “in engine” time was spent on the encounters system. The encounters system is a general term for the system that enables designers to define the flow of the campaign. The creation of it consisting of the following elements:
The creation of a system of inheritable scriptable objects that allows designers to create encounters inside the editor. This system supports narrative scenes, ship building scenes, and combat encounters
A refactor of the game management system to allow ships to be spawned in at the start of scenes. Previously, the enemy ship existed in the scene at the start. Now, the game spawns the game. This ensures the number of scenes is limited, as there is only one combat Unity scene that is constantly being used.
A campaign scriptable object that defines the order of each encounter. This allows them to be played in a linear sequence. In addition, designers can create and rework the order of elements as they wish.
Repository Management (3 hours)
I spent two hours this week on maintaining the repository, which involves merging pull request, fixing Merge Conflicts and hotfixing the build when needed. I merged in 48 pull requests these past two weeks, which is a higher amount than previous projects. A large part was spent giving feedback on pull requests. I don’t want to be strict on pull requests, as that severely limits productivity and morale. However, there were many instances when pull requests contained code that didn’t compile, didn’t contain necessary files, or didn’t implement the required tasks, and I had to write feedback on what needed to be improved.
There were only a few merge conflicts these past two weeks (which is a testament to how many people are being careful). However there were some merge conflicts that were hard to solve, either because they were large or ended in a substantial duplication of assets. In addition, there were some merges that created compilation errors and softlocks. For instance, the implementation of in-combat dialogue required the time scale to be set to 0, which broke narrative scenes, so I had to reverse those changes to prevent a softlocking bug.
Programming Meetings & Office Hours (6 hours)
A lot of my time this week has been spent in meetings. There are two types of meetings:
The weekly all-hands meetings. 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. In addition, this week I provided a problem-solving demonstration where I taught them how to use VS Code.
Office Hours. These are a type of optional, opt-in work sessions that I host twice a week for an hour (I started this week). These are places where programmers can go to get help or work collaboratively.
Task Creation and JIRA (3 hours)
A large part of my week was JIRA management of the project. My job was to create a lot of these tasks (30+ JIRA tasks). I put sufficient detail into these tasks to ensure programmers had guidance and clear objectives. I’m continuing my long-running tradition of adding a “HELPFUL LINKS” section to each task (this idea was inspired by the Hints documents in EECS 494). A major problem in previous semesters was that members often struggled with figuring out how to implement their tasks, and often were directionless when facing new tasks. This problem is exacerbated by the number of new programmers and the fact that this is a really complex codebase. To combat this, I created this sections to guide programmers on where to find relevant information (this has the added bonus of familiarizing them with our resources).