Sprint 5

My work for this sprint was mostly clerical. Unfortunately, it felt like I couldn’t really get new cards, I was kind of working, and iterating on old cards, and it just felt weird. I’ve been grappling with the ideas for this inventory system for a while, and it’s taken me a long time to kind of determine what I want from it, and how it should work. I knew I wanted something that’d make me struggle and work to make it possible, and I got pretty much exactly what I asked for. On the surface, it shouldn’t be so bad. It’s a matter of just hooking up things in the correct way. The issue I get with it is that there’s so many conditions to making all this stuff work in harmony, and I’m never sure what’s a result of poor organization, poor programming, or if I just need to keep pushing through.


Once I started filling out item prefabs, I also changed up some aspects of the item inventory and savedata; I wanted to get as close as possible to implementing items that I could, and I didn’t quite make it work.

The struggles I ran into was that scene transitioning was harder than I thought it would be. Part of that was me making it harder for myself than it needed to be, and part of it was some very real struggles with the initialization of assets.

Asset initialization in Unity is rough, because there’s a way for idiots trying to make their first game that doesn’t scale, a way for people that need a super optimized approach that seems like it was built with all the grace of a sick dog, and I’m just trying to pass a game manager between scenes without everything dying.



Unfortunately, a great amount of my work this sprint was probably unnecessary; I wasn’t sure how fully coupled the code was and how much data needed to be transferred over from one scene to the next. Instead of verifying with the people around me, I elected to do some unnecessary coupling of code. While this isn’t a huge deal, it did mean time spent this sprint was wasted on things that were ultimately not productive. I wish I had spent more time on connecting the items in a more productive way.



In order to make sure the next sprint is better, I talked with the other programmer, Milo, in order to see what’s really needed for us to hook everything up in a way that works. What I realized from that interaction is that the only necessary script that had to be passed between scenes is PlayerManager, the scope of the project became a little more manageable. I didn’t really have to pass through everything and make sure the UI was hooked up to every little thing, which was an absolute godsend in terms of getting everything together.



I’m still confident we’ll end this semester with a fully developed, actualized, game. I feel like this sprint and the last one have not been productive for me, and I have taken the steps I needed in order to make sure we finish strong. This team deserves the best quality of work I can provide, and I fully plan on giving it to them. This next sprint, I’ll finish what I started, and we plan on turning the game into its fully polished, feature-complete release, with art assets and everything. It’ll be tough, but I think we have a codebase strong enough to handle the changes.