Senior Production - Week 7
This past week was probably the biggest hurdle of our cycle yet. It started out pretty well, the designers met together on Monday and did a read through of our narrative. The narrative and dialogue interactions feel really good and are entertaining to read, I feel like players will enjoy it when we eventually get it into the build. We discussed the dialogue system at our meeting as well and came up with a fall back plan if it wasn't ready, we would create a Twine prototype to get feedback on the writing and see if people really like the interactions and understood the characters we create.
Fast forward to Wednesday, we have our full team meeting and the programming team says that the dialogue system is crashing the engine. We all have a bit of a panic, but Dmitri explains that they are getting closer to figuring out what is causing the problem. When the bug was first found it just didn't display any text or output that states the personality system was connecting to it, now the output shows the connection but crashes the whole engine. We at least feel better knowing we have our back up so we can resume testing again, and the Artists report is moving at a good pace which is nice, so Wednesday wasn't so bad. Today, as class started I talked with Dmitri who has figured out the problem and explained that when we try and get a customer it pulls from an array, but when we first load getting that customer it says that our starting value isn't in the array and kicks us out. Now that we know the problem I think the programmers can figure it out and hopefully (not making promises here) get it implemented over break. Most of the team is staying in Burlington over Spring Break and we are hoping to use that time to get all our features in and done with so we can just focus on polish and getting our bosses/customers in and ready for the end of the semester.