Devlog 5

For the fifth week of game programming, I had three major accomplishments; The first was that I was able to somewhat implement the dialogue feature for my game, which allows the user to click on a person and walk to their location and talk to them. Currently, however, the text on screen doesn’t seem to display as well as it should, and I’m not entirely sure what the issue is. However, I know for a fact that this issue can be resolved quickly and more time with it this week will be dedicated towards fixing that issue, along side the one small issue left with the inventory UI. The second major accomplishment was being able to get some time with Lindsay and work on technical errors I was facing at the time, especially regarding the problem I had regarding how to get the player to move to only locations where items or other characters were depending on the mode. This was one of the major things that I wanted to get fixed with my game, as it would help differentiate the other modes such as the talking mode The final thing that I had accomplished this week was the testing tutorial: getting to playtest my game and compare them with others really enlightened me with how well I was going compared to others, as well as how different others were programming compared to mine. No two games were alike, which made me happy to see, and many other people had opted for something simplistic as well. Not a single game, however, felt neglected, and it was clear to see that each game had effort put into it. It also served as a good opportunity to get feedback for my own game and how it was going. I felt as if I did a good enough job with helping explain the game to the testers without guiding them directly, and a few of them were able to point out a few issues I hadn’t even considered (due to time constraints, however, I don’t think I’ll be able to fix them). These issues mainly revolved around the other modes an hitboxes – if I were to click on the axe whilst the player was already standing over it in pick up mode, the player wouldn’t be able to get it due to their hitboxes already overlapping. A similar issue occurs when the talking state, as the player will completely hide behind the person they are trying to talk to rather than standing beside them, although this could be coded to add an offset to the player’s movement.

For my final week, it’s mainly polishing the current game features, as well as potentially adding the describe/look at feature that I set out to make. That way, I would have been able to accomplish the majority of my goals regarding the game mechanics, even if the game itself isn’t exactly there. I might check with Lindsay to finish up those last few glitches, but he has already given me a few useful pointers to help me with those issues.