Week 6 ERA Daniel Svensson

I would love to forget this week ever happened because this is officially the week of horror.

That might be a bit of an overstatement but this production has been plagued by technical difficulties and other wonderful hazards. What fascinates me more than anything was that it all happened during a single week, let me tell you about it.

The biggest issue by far that we faced was that our lead graphical artist had his computer basically die on the spot during Wednesday.

What happened was that the fan in the computer started making this unearthly hollow sound that was unbearable to listen too so we had to shut it down. We spent the better part of the afternoon to try and fix it but to no avail, in the end we called dell support and they said they would return next Monday to fix it.

This was a major issue because we had texturing to be done and not a whole lot of time to do it, so I did what had to be done and gave up my computer so he could finish them since they were a high priority deadline.

During Thursday and Friday there were a lot of computer swapping but none of my tasks required a computer to finish anyway although we had other disturbing issues to deal with.

One of our programmers was basically sick the entire week and our lead programmer had terrible issues with unity. To explain the difficulty briefly version control in unity could not sync his project and he spent the better part of the week to try and fix it until Friday when we basically sat down the entire team and merged everything into one project.

All these problems means we have a large backlog of stuff to do and little time to fix it, so we have to either work over-time (which seems inevitable at this point) and or change things in our design.

Killing your darlings is an expression I often hear related to time constraints and in this case it could not be more true. I had to change a lot of the design during these couples of weeks and many times for the better because I have noticed I have a tendency to make heavy systems with lots of mechanics, and when the time constraints starts to knock on the door the unnecessary bits tend to die fast.

But this week we had to do some heavy cutting, I refer specifically to the talent system, in this system champions and the commander are suppose to share experience points from killing enemies on the battlefield and gain you talent points for customization .

What they get for sharing this experience is talent points, each level you gain one talent point each skill has a skill level of five. This means you can put a maximum of five talent points into one skill. Each talent point you put into a skill will give you a choice, it is this choice that makes them unique.

 You get to choose from a pool of different abilities, but only two options are presented to you at any given level. These choice can range from anything from gaining more damage, to a lower cool down per attack.

We cut this system down to just gaining more attributes per level, it severely reduces the amount of customization a player can do but i saves a lot of time for production.

Sometimes you juts have to remove the bandage.

Until next time

/Lunatic