Log #24: Jan/24/2025

  • Design Documentation Improvements
  • Bottle Neck
  • Filling in a Game

External limitations made this week a little less productive, though I did make significant progress on improving our project's game documentation. Now I think the game documentation is becoming decently useful.

Our project is bottle-necking on me though. I have not clearly planned too many details of the game, so people on my team are running out of things to do. Actually, this is a great problem. I just need to stay on my job so that we can pull it all together.

Currently, the dialouge system for our project is being redone, so our DEMO is broken right now. However, more of the pieces of the subsequent levels are being completed, so I think things should happen more quickly once the dialogue system is finished.

MATH SEGMENT: Geometry

I fixed an additional detail or two on our Demo level and spent a few minutes working on the second level. I re-did the first hallway in level 2 to feel more natural, mainly by making it thinner --I made it 2.1 meters wide rather than the previous 3, which felt unnaturally wide (in real life, even 2.1 is big, but in-game it feels more normal).

What I've been doing is much the same. Early on, I made some "base pieces" which work like building blocks that I can copy and paste throughout our levels. This saves time so I don't have to make a hallway repeatedly. However, I have a suspicion some of my "base pieces" are slightly off, because I've ran into problems where my walls have annoying seams. In order to fix the seams, I have to manually adjust the walls' coordinates until everything lines up nicely.

A corner where the walls aren't lined up quite right.

A corner where the walls are nice and neat!.

The two above images show an artificial example of things I may run into. It's hard to see in the first image, but one wall is slightly closer, revealing a slim gray side.

MATH SEGMENT: Algebra and Functions

This week I spent time re-doing some of my planning flowcharts. I wanted to fix them to be simpler, and to make sure they fit the feel I wanted. I feel like I have poorly planned when I redo flowcharts like these so late.

The main thing I filtered out of the flowcharts was needless pieces of dialogue. Because the programming behind the dialouge system seems more than simple, I wanted to remove anything extra. Additionally, the old flowcharts involved needless checks, like checking whether or not the player was in a chair so the NPCs could have more unique responses. While these would be cool, I want to make sure we get the game's main mechanics down first in order to keep things simple.

Essentially, I have been simplifying the plans so that branches in the dialogue are more minimal, and so that we do not need to build additional systems to check for information that isn't actually super relevant.

To look at this from a coding perspective, I am basically trying to reduce the number of "if statements" in my design plans, as well as trying to reduce what operators the if statements use for their checks. When I say reducing operators, I mean reducing the number of unique ways that the game needs to respond to the player. We already have a system of player dialogue responses, so we could reuse that pretty easily, but going an additional step and making a system to check if the player is standing under a light, for example, may not be necessary. I want to remove needless mechanisms, and if we have time, we can go back and add complexity.

A simpler flowchart for interaction with an NPC. Unfortunately, I don't know if I still have the old flowchart, but trust me in that it was more complex...

That's all I have for today's blog. Thank you for taking the time to read!

-Luke Knotts


Okay, so I don't want my email to be scrapped by bots so I'll explain it to you. First you write my name, but with an 'f', all lowercase. So you get, 'fluke', got it? Okay, then you add an 's', to really make the email say 'flukes', all lowercase still. Then there's a dot, like a, erm, period. You know. Those things we use in writing. After that is the word 'targets', like the things you miss in life. Then there's a 0, or a ZERO, if you prefer it written out. From there it's the typical, '@icloud.com', you know, one of those 'at' signs, but the symbol, and then it's followed by an 'i', the word 'cloud' and then another one of those dot things (.) and 'com', which I think is short for company. So that's my email. Hopefully that helps.