#7 Adapting my scope to meet the deadline

So, this week I checked the deadline for my GAM140 assignments and found out they are due on the 16th of April. This means that I have just under 3 weeks to finish my game. Meaning that I need to speed up development of this project in order to get it finished in time.

Old Day Cycle New Day Cycle

I decided to scope the game back and the easiest way to do this was to remove the shop and research games element of each day cycle. This would drastically speed up development of the game as I only need to focus on 4 areas instead of 6.

Next, I wanted to fix the issue I was having linking variables to UI. If I could link variables to the UI then I could add +1 to the stats and not worry about setting it to exact values each time which caused me to have to create many flowcharts that do the same thing.

In order to do this, I looked online but couldn’t find an easy solution that didn’t involve code so I got on a call with Paul (one of my lecturers) who wrote some code in a few minutes that worked!

Or so I thought.

When I tried to set the variable to change the UI, I found that it was backwards. So, the UI can change the variable, but the variable can’t change the UI. At first, I thought I could remedy this by possibly changing the code around or something similar, but it didn’t work as I can’t write code.

I then asked my friend Hayley who is studying programming to see if she could help. She added a line to the code that said “slider.value += change;” which in conjunction with me realising the variables should be floats not integers fixed the problem.

(fix) I can now set the UI to the variable

Now I can increase or decrease the variable and instantly set the UI slider the same value as the variable meaning that I can get rid of all the extra flowcharts and branches that are no longer needed. This also enables me to use if statements meaning that I can make it so if the variable is larger than 5 one thing happens and if it is 5 or below something else happens.

Previous Flowchart New Flowchart

As you can see there are no longer copies which means that writing dialogue won’t take as long as before.

I then wrote some more dialogue and I arrived at the choosing a game option once again. Last time I did this it had no real choice but this time I wanted to make the choice matter. So, I added a new Boolean variable called “Moinight” which if you choose either of the games “Moincreft” or “Borknight” would set it to true and if you choose one of the other 2 games it would be false.

Now that there is a variable that is either true or false, I can make it so that when the player chooses their game a second time, if it’s similar to the previous game, it will give the player a bonus follower, however if it isn’t similar the player will only gain 1 follower. This just adds a little bit of strategy into the game as the choice they make actually matters.

figuring out if the player chooses a similar game or not

I then proceeded to write out up to day 5 following the new day cycle. during the last couple of days, I have made some differences depending on the follower count as the more followers the character has, the more sentient. This means that I have been starting to get into the actual plot of the game which is defeating the sentient character.

I am now towards the end of the dialogue phase of this project which took a lot longer than I originally anticipated. This means that I will hopefully be able to finish off all the dialogue and story by the end of the week and work on the art and music after. I also hope to finish this entire game by the end of the easter break as I still need to work on the 3D level design.

I think my progress this week has been a lot better, but I need to do a lot more if I want to get it finished in time. Next week I want to get the dialogue finished and start work on the art and look of the game. I have overcome many issues I had this week so I hope that progress in the weeks ahead will be much greater than before.