Lum's Daily Work Blog

Totally stealing Chris' idea... er.... repurposing it. Yeah, that's the ticket!

Discussion goes HERE -> https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...-discussion-about-lums-daily-work-blog.88764/

(Actually prompted by a poster implying that not enough work was being done on story/questing systems which is... uh... most of what I do!)

5/3/17

• Briefly had an existential crisis thanks to feedback implying I didn't exist
• Implemented requested change from Richard - players going from Resolute to Harvest on Path of Courage quest had to pass a tier-5 control point which implied a bit too much courage. Added Knight of Norgard to southern side of Sanctus Spine that offers a one-time-only teleport skip.
• Did some code support regarding journals/active tasks for Puuk who is going over the tutorial scenes with a fine-toothed comb
• Change I did yesterday to NPC conversations (re-adding conversation mode on launch for all, adding a canned line to open windows and close the mode for interactable NPCs like bankers and merchants) fails on bankers because unlike most merchants saying "bank" to a banker makes them stare at you and do nothing. Adding "bank" keyword to EVERY BANKER IN THE GAME. yay.
• Collecting info on Solace Bridge Outskirts quests for Dallas so he can do his metrics magic on quest completion.
• Began writing Spoony the Bard for Brittany. Yes, that Spoony.

 

Mostly dialog work on the schedule today (aka I actually get to write stuff!) Briefly, how NPC scripts for SOTA get implemented:

If a main story character, Richard and Tracy Hickman's story bible has all main characters blocked out with plot lines and dialog hints/suggestions. Sometimes Richard will come up with side characters as well (such as Spoony the Bard whom I'm working on today and is based on a certain well-known streamer) and will add his suggestions to a JIRA (our bug tracking/project management/bane of my existence tool).

Then, a designer (me, in this case) will actually implement the dialog. We used to use a Unity state machine tool called The Spaghetti Machine to do this, but as our dialogs got more complex it became obvious we needed to use an external tool for dialog editing. So, um, I wrote one! Here's a snapshot of what Arabella's initial dialog in the Isle of Storms (the first scene in the game) looks like in it.



Through this we can do pretty much anything needed in a dialog such as gating responses based on knowledge flags, have the NPC play an emote, give items/XP, etc. Once the actual writing is done it's then exported to Unity, where the actual NPC spawner is placed. The whole process can take a very short time or for complicated characters with a lot to say or difficult quest logic can take upwards of a day or more. Spoony will probably take a few hours since Richard has a lot of dialog queued up for him.

 

5/5/1955 (On this day in 1955, the Federal Republic of Germany gained full independence from Allied occupation. Congratulations to our German players and Bavarian-in-residence @tphilipp...)

- Fixing error with crown merchants that showed up that may imply a problem with keyword parsing elsewhere in the system. Work on localization is turning up quite a few of these. (This took the vast majority of the day - was indeed a problem with how keyword shortcut buttons interacted with the parser, and bumped everything else I planned to do, sigh)
- Fixed Solace Bridge Outskirts merchants so they work again
- Removed the Death Bunny quest because spring has sprung

 

5/6-7/16

- Finally got to the Witcher 3 expansions, finished Heart of Stone

Spoiler

totally killed the devil

- Felt more than a little jealous about the production values and art in the game, then remembered that CD Projekt had roughly the GDP of Poland as a budget to work with

 

5/8/16 - Today in 1828, Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross, was born. Pitch them a fiver if you get a chance.

- Currently looking at a Unity re-import (the bane of everyone's existence, since our project is so large it can take all day). So guess I'll be doing.... things not depending on Unity! That would be blocking out conversations for the Brittany stage of the new Path of the Oracle step which thankfully isn't dependent on Unity to work on.
- R41 Postmortem prep
- R41 Postmortem
- ...


(Hi Reddit! Two quick notes: the wisecrack about the GDP of Poland is obviously a joke referring to Witcher 3's large budget and very large dev team based in Poland. Second note: the script for Path of the Oracle is written but has to be actually implemented in game.)

 

5/9/16

- Out sick
- Slept a lot
- Tormented my cat

 

5/10/16

- Back to work on Path of the Oracle prep work, concentrating today on -things- you'll need to get -thing- to -thing-.
- Got @Lord British 's approval for a cool puzzle everyone will hate
- Meetings
- ...

 

5/11/16

- Path of Oracle, specifically [REDACTED]

 

5/12/16

- Kickoff meetings for Boreas and Sequanna Colossus redesign
- Path of Oracle, specifically [REDACTED] and initial meeting with the Oracle
- ...

 

5/15/16
- Update to Unity 5.6.fun.fun.fun
- Continuing work on Temple of the Oracle
- ...

 

5/16/16



(yes, that was an actual bug.)

- Work on the first quest sequence for Path of the Oracle.

 

5/17/16

- Whining about Unity crashing at me to Chris.
- Upgrading Visual Studio since Chris laughed at me for running one years out of date and then complaining that I was crashing when debugging Unity.
- Continuing work on Path of the Oracle implementation