Dev Log #3 - Out of the Cold

This week sees a return to regular updates on development of Obituary, after delays caused by multiple weeks of personal illness within the team.

In terms of introductions, I'm Andrew and I fill the dual roles of Obituary's Producer and Tech Lead. This sees me responsible for the game's coding, as well as ensuring all team members are supported and able to complete their work on schedule to hit our production targets in time for our upcoming showcase events. As a team, we're in regular contact with each other to discuss where we're at and where we need to head next, so we can avoid becoming mired in sections of the project that do not contribute towards the end goal. One example of this occurred very early in the project's development, where I spent a significant amount of time being unable to get our Player, John, to jump in 3D space - not once stopping to think about whether it was necessary until discussing the difficulty the following week in a team meeting (hint: it wasn't)!

Speaking of schedules, I am currently maintaining a rough guide to what we need to work on across the weeks leading up to our final build and project release:

In in, completed tasks are shown in green, while works in progress are coloured blue. Each line is filled with specific tasks that need to be completed, however they do not equate to a line per team member and they remain flexible to allow them to be moved around as necessary but without being removed from the schedule until completed. Once confirmation of the November Let's Break Games event is confirmed, for example, there will be an item added to show when it falls (02/11 or 09/11, at last discussion).

On the programming front, all of my now-returning energy is being focused on upgrading our inventory system from a simple collection of boolean fields indicating if an item is possessed or not to a fully dynamic inventory. While still a work in progress, once complete it will allow for the selection of items to show more detail of each item in the middle sections of the screen (image above, text below), as well as to allow players to move items around to better organise their possessions, and also to drop items from the inventory to make room for new items to be picked up and carried around. Once dropped, an item will be removed from the inventory and re-spawned in the game scene as a new game object, able to be picked up again later, if it is again required. An example of how this will appear is included below:

This is proving to be more difficult to pull off than originally expected however, and is still very much a work in progress - even when following tutorials made by others, it is clear that a dynamic inventory is a lot of work to implement!

Stay tuned for now, as next week will see an update from Charlie, Obituary's Art Lead.