Senior Production Blog 4

This week all and all, could’ve be better.

This is the end of a sprint, which means there are certain deliverables that I expected to have done and in the build to get feedback on and improve upon.

The issue I had this week is that both of my programmers failed to have the deliverables done by the end of the sprint. There were snags in both the customer trait system, as well as the worm behavior system.

Now I can’t really blame them, considering this is their first time working unreal, and we knew there would be some concerns on that front. However, the issue remains where I was promised completion of systems at a certain time, and those system remain incomplete. Which holds us up. On a project where we are already cutting it close when it comes to time.

So we did what anyone would, we looked at the reasons for why there was a holdup, and plan in the future to make sure that this won’t happen again. We move our time table back a bit, and I reiterated the point that if there are any concerns at any time, that I will make time to be available to help alleviate them.

For the worm system, there proved to be an issue trying to recreate the behaviors we have now into a proper behavior tree. The solution that we decided to go forth with was to use the behavior tree for the other boss behaviors, and for the worm keep it to more pattern based, with some additional behavior when it comes to attacking the player. Hopefully this will work out to have the worm behaviors finished and done, so we can start moving forward on the next boss.

When it came to the customer system, the issue came mostly because of an unfamiliarity with unreal and too much time spent on trying to learn how to use unreal blueprints instead of working in unreal C++. The issue is that it was more efficient to use C++ for this system, so the time spent learning blueprints for it, was sort of wasted.

It is hard for me to be completely disappointed in my team, because I know how hard they are working. But we need to learn from this, because we really can not afford to make this mistake more than once in this project.