Once More, With Feeling

15 February, 2024 

This week, we mourn. We mourn the loss of precious time that Ryan could have spent pushing afflicted closer to the much-anticipated finish line, when he was instead grappling with an infuriating beast: Unity. Let’s not wait around though, because we have things to do. Join me as we journey into this week’s Weekly Cheese!

Check It Out

It’s time to run the gauntlet and see what the team’s been up to over the past week. We were fairly quiet this week, but things were still pushing forward as always. Before we dive in, let’s talk about the struggles that Ryan has faced. According to some scholarly sources, Unity has a nasty habit of randomly disconnecting scripts from their respective components. This can wreak unknowable havoc on an in-progress game that requires a lot of scripting in order for things to work properly, and that’s exactly what happened. While this is a lot of hooplah to those of you who don’t dig too deeply into details, just know that Ryan was forced to repeat a butt-ton of work he’s already done. So if you see him, give him a pat on the back and tip your hat. He’s out here blazing the path forward and incurring the wrath of Unity, the beast we all know and love. Let’s check in with the team:

• Ryan

  • Repeated last week’s work 🥹🔫

  • Redid the player inventory system to use Unity Player Cloud Save instead of Unity Economy.

  • Reduced the need to write cloud code, now our items will automatically sync up to the cloud when we create them.

  • Added a bunch of new currency / item pickups to the game to serve as placeholders.

  • Fixed a bug causing the Gameplay Inventory to not update properly when picking up items/moving items.

  • Added Mike's Cheese guns.

  • Converted all the Unity Economy Logic to Unity Cloud Save - way faster and way less limitations. Ton of JSON BS but it's working nicely.

  • Modeled the PlayerInventory to just have lists for each Entity type that it needs to store. i.e PlayerInventory.Weapons, PlayerInventory.Skins, PlayerInventory.Currencies, etc.

  • Cleaned up the PlayerData class - I was starting to really muddy this up outside of what it was intended for.

  • Implemented a TechTree that draws dynamically based on the RecipeData for each item in the EntityDatabase. We can customize connections with intermediate connectors also. Still a lot of work to be done but I think with the right graphics this thing is gonna looks heckin’ neat.

  • Implemented the LobbySystem with our games core systems.

  • Fixed a race condition between the CloudInventory and PlayerService class that caused accounts to get duplicated for a given Steam ID. I need to create a new system that strictly handles the authentication and then activates all the other systems that depend on Unity's auth services. Right now it’s in PlayerServices but I don’t think that should be the case anymore.

  • Created a new custom UI control that acts as a toggle button since Unity doesn’t have one... seriously wtf dudes.

  • Moved all weapon list logic from the main view to the new weapon loadout panel.

  • Vitals

    • CoLdBrEaWCounter == 16

• Bryan

  • Developed a weapon acquisition document, detailing how players will be acquiring/constructing their kinetic and cheese weapons.

  • Working closely with 3Dartninja to build out the elite zombies for each map, as well as thematically appropriate common mobs for each map. These elites are starting to look EPIC.

• Bruce

  • Continuing his work with skin designs for Terry!

• Marc

  • He’s still making memes, as he should. This surprises no one.

• Cam

  • Working with Bryan to continue building out those thematic zombies.

    • Squid Note: I’ve seen one, and lemme tell ya… it’s pretty sweet.

• Cole

  • Still working on the city. It’s slow, and to be fair I was hella busy this week so I got less done than I wanted. Womp.

  • Started creating .svg versions of weapon icons, as they will allow us to do rescaling as needed without compromising the visual fidelity of the images.

  • STILL need to investigate performance draws within THE_SWAMP map. Seriously, I’ll get to it eventually.

Busy! Always busy! But if we weren’t, would it really be afflicted? I think not.

Thematic Zombies?

You heard right…certain zombies are going to be map-specific! That means around each corner of our maps, you could come in contact with a special baddie with a bone to pick (no, not that kind of baddie). But what would they look like, you might ask? Well I can’t tell ya, but I can give you this glorious image in the meantime…

Who could it be?

Idk, but you’ll find out eventually…

In Closing

Glad you’re all here with us, and I hope you had a great Valentine’s Day!

Goodnight,  

Squid