Time Spent This Week: 11 hours and 5 minutes

11/9 - ~2 hours and 35 minutes

• ~1 hour and 5 minutes - Research into connecting inventory values into dialog branches. This led to research on the application of gameplay tags and how to add them to the system. This seemed a bit inefficient for the setup we already have, but it may need re-explored if necessary.
• ~1 hour and 30 minutes - Troubleshooting Thomas's system for checking the player’s inventory. None of the variables I tried changing affected the issue of Battery always being selected, so I assumed the issue must be coming from the blackboard variable not changing. I learned the next day that it was because the task both wasn’t being called in the behavior tree and looked in the dialog component for the item instead of the player component.

11/10 - ~3 hours and 10 minutes

• 2 hours and 20 minutes - Continued to work on an item check for the dialogue behavior tree. I ended up making the check into a decorator for the behavior tree since adding it as a task wasn’t getting the results we needed. The implementation as-it-is is a bit finicky since it requires the item to be visible in the player inventory to work. Items that the player can pick up that don’t show up in the inventory like a flashlight or TV remote don’t seem to trigger correctly in the code.

The decorator blueprint:

• 50 minutes - Began re-exporting kitchen models due to pivot point issues. While the kitchen models I made were made with the default Maya skeleton for a general scale, the pivot points did need adjustment to work properly in Unreal. I’ve been importing them into an Unreal project to test that they’re working correctly and going back into Maya when they don’t work as expected. I had to redo the oven multiple times due to issues with the handles not staying connected. Whatever happened last time that kept the models as one object during my testing wasn't happening this time.

11/11 - 35 minutes

• 35 minutes - Continued re-exporting files, this time merging connected objects. I learned too late that merging the models together caused the UVs to overlap, so I had to diagnose some files to make sure they didn’t have broken UVs before uploading.

File exports were finished over the weekend. The time spent was negligible but frequently interrupted, so I wasn’t able to keep track of how long it took exactly.

11/14 - 1 hour and 10 minutes

• 1 hour and 10 minutes - Ran Assets Cleaner on a backup of revision 99 in preparation for playtesting. Running the plugin led to over 1100 unused assets being removed (most of which seemed to be from the Edith Finch cannery pack), an increased project file size (due to multiple copies of the built version appearing in the file for some reason after running Assets Cleaner) and a build size reduced by .26 GB.

11/15 - 3 hours and 35 minutes

• 45 minutes - Helped Thomas with the system to track how many times the player has talked to an NPC. I could foresee issues connecting this counter to the dialog component and I couldn’t find a way to connect it to the behavior tree’s blackboard, so I suggested connecting it to a variable in the NPC’s actor blueprint.
• 2 hours and 50 minutes - Wrote dialog for Arrogance. I took a bit of liberty with the characterization and with the specific message as a result, but overall I think it meets the idea of what we had in mind for the character.