Preproduction

Clockwork Sword

Over the last three weeks, Clockwork Sword went through its preproduction phase. For this phase, I spent a large amount of time refactoring major systems like attacks, inventory, and enemy state machines. I also spent a large amount of time reviewing code, discussing code architecture, and teaching team members how to use various systems. I also lead several meetings and assigned tasks to all of the other engineers.

Inventory Refactor

The inventory system needed to support dynamic load-outs where items could be attached to each other depending on each item's unique slots. The old system had only 6 predefined item slots. The new system instead stored the inventory as a tree of item slots where each slot had a type, current item, and child item slots. The item type and child slots were both dynamically generated based on the item prefabs.

State Machine

I also did a bunch of work on the state machine editor. This last week I focused on the inspector and I created the concept of value. Values could be either constant or dynamic.

Dynamic values are either calculation like raycasting, math, or logic; or they read an exiting variable, like health.