Senior Production Blog 9

This was the week of when the first release candidate was due. Which means that this week saw all hands on deck to scramble to get in what we could.

This week, my task was that of the big middle man of each of the systems that were being implemented, fixing bugs that arose because of that, helping the other disciplines get their assets in, and then animation implementation (fun).

And boy did all of that take all of my time. The animations themselves took a solid 14 hours of work in order to get them implemented and then corrected to make them look and feel as good as possible. From there, I needed to make sure that the customer and dialogue system was correctly implemented with recurring customers (front-end, and with data saving), adding small bits of polish to everything, and making sure that if any bugs arose (and they did) that I would be able to take care of them and fix it.

In the middle of all of this, we ran into an issue where the version of unreal we were using (4.13) was having some issue with the way it was dealing with the boss AI. There was some oddity with the engine that caused a function that was supposed to work, to not. So interestingly enough, we had a choice.

Switch versions to 4.15 (skipping 4.14 because of asset implementation issues), or to find a workaround and would take an unknown amount of hours to get done, and pray that it gets done on time.

So let it be known, that on the long list of stupid ideas that we have this production cycle that worked out, we switched engine versions in the last week of solid work on the game. The fact that is works is great, but there is a solid 75 percent of me that says that this was the wrong thing to do. It was a risk, and in the end it worked out, we go the troll in and working.

Then we ran into another issue that actually drove me insane. The repository stopped working correctly. It seemed to lose the ability to pull files from the repo onto almost any computer, or if it did work, took upwards of an hour to do so. Stupid decision number 2 this week, I made the choice to abandon the HG repo we were using, and to use another HG repo (called HG-2, naturally) where the issue was not present.

And that worked. Two days before it was due, we switched our working repo, and only ran into minor issues.

From there, I was able to pull, and work for the solid two days almost non-stop to make sure that everyone else got their work in, and making sure that everything worked together nicely.

For now, we fix what we can, polish where we can, and balance whatever the QA results give us.