Easy (but essential) Notes

This past week, I was slapped with one of the easiest, yet most valuable tasks I could possibly think of. Merging everybody’s work on the programming team into a single build is a painful process, one that thankfully Daye takes on with grace and bravery. I’m fairly certain it will shave years off of their life, but they nonetheless do it on a fairly regular basis. One of the most hellish things about merging is that some components don’t quite merge properly regardless of whether or not someone has been working on them.

Enter easy notes. Easy notes are simple notes attached to game objects that explain what they do. It’s now my job to go through a lot of the game objects and give them easy notes, describing what states the various components need to be in. This should avoid confusion in the future. This made up a hefty amount of my week.

The Merchant

We also introduced the Merchant into the game, a character that Otto can sell items to and purchase items from. Unfortunately, this rhinoceros-looking gentleman gave us quite a bit of trouble at first, and he still is. Long story short, some of the elements required for having a functioning shop are not quite behaving as expected.

A Love/Hate Relationship

Love/Hate is an essential part of the game that keeps track of Otto’s relationship with the various factions, such as Buzzers, Creepers, and Spinners. These relationships affect how successful or unsuccessful Ottos is in interacting with these creatures in various ways. We’re in the early stages of introducing this mechanic, but we got off to a great start by discovering the proper way to create a faction within a faction, allowing the Buzzer, Spinner, and Creeper factions to all reside under the Bug faction.

Next Week

The Merchant is an essential part of the next build, so that will likely be a large focus of the next week. I expect more Love/Hate functionality will also be experimented with. I’ll also hopefully be able to start moving on from Otto’s House and start implementing new things in new areas of the game.

Media Rec

This week, I purchased some novels in the Mass Effect series. Mass Effect is easily my favorite game franchise I’ve ever played. The original trilogy’s characters and narrative are brilliant, along with third-person shooting mechanics that are able to stand on their own. Mass Effect: Legendary Edition releases on May 14 as the remastered versions of the first three games. If you haven’t played the series before, this is definitely worth the $60 price tag. It’s one of the few things EA has gotten right.