Sprint 6: I have no mouth and I must devlog

 I keep trying to find words for this and I keep failing because it's hard enough even when you know what you're doing with a game. In this case, I don't. The lateness of this is kind of proof enough of that. This game has a lot that needs to be done, and at this point I'm not quite sure how to fix it;

Items were not working in a desirable state, and I figured that the best way of dealing this was to make items more portable and to solve the issue with tight decoupling by moving it all to an item manager. Most of my work these last few sprints has been to try and get this item manager working, which has been difficult at best since I failed to coordinate with the other coder on my team. We did finally get the systems working together at the tail end of this sprint, but by then it was mostly too late to add the desired functionality of most of the items.

It's regrettable; I take full responsibility for most of the cuts since I was stuck with a programming problem I refused help with and let consume me until the very end of the sprint. I was concerned, for a while, with a possible error in the item inventory list, only to find out that the way I set it up in the first place ensured that it wouldn't be an issue.



As a leader, I did fail to assign work towards the tail end of this sprint that mattered; we got plenty of models, but the programming was completely screwed up. I failed to prioritize key projects that would've gotten things tied together more efficiently by the end, partially because I couldn't visualize them, partially because I felt possessive towards the items system and didn't seek out help over the course of the sprint, and finally because I was attracted to the convenience of having Milo focus solely on upgrades, since they were easy to write out and chart while I needed extra time to figure out the role items played.


This was, ultimately, unfair to Milo and unfair to the team. In the end, most of the issues resulting in the project appearing to be underbaked are a direct result of my stubbornness on the item issue. If I accepted I needed help with the item design and delegated tasks concerning items to the rest of my team in a more even matter, I would've had much more success with implementing the features. This reflects poorly on my behavior as a teammate, and leader.



As for the work I've done this sprint, the most important stuff has been implementing the items in full. This involves adding physical models to the items, adding features as requested to the items, and then finally adding additional properties to the items so they can be sold and marked in the game properly. All items have been templated, placed in the game, work off the same rules, have the same extendability, and all of them can be referenced from the same point in the script. Having something come out so clean does make me proud, at least. What I wish is that I spent the time to properly chart it out, communicated with my other programmer so that it could be implemented properly, remove myself from problems I found too difficult in order to focus on features that could actually be tested, and finally communicate with my team better. For now, I'm just happy that everyone's work has been properly represented in-game.