The Problem

The aim of this month was to generate and deliver a prototype version of our game, Realm Blade. The goal was to really focus on the game play loop. We opted to deprioritize art style and design and instead just use free assets that we could find on the marketplace. Seemed like a simple enough concept. With our initial searches, we found an amazing model that would be perfect for the prototype. After porting the model into the game, we were extremely satisfied with not only the look of the model, but the animations and sound effects as well. Everything appeared to be working fine until we ran into a massive hurdle...

<Image of our first Model Choice>

As we went down the list of functionality to be added to the game, we finally came across the weapon switch feature. In concept, this feature is extremely easy to implement. It was only after a few minutes did we realize the character model we had chosen to use had a sword prefixed to the characters skeletal mesh which means that we did not have the ability to add or remove weapons from the player without it looking horrible. Sadden with the reality that the character model we had chosen was not going to work, we opted to scrap the model from the project and use the Manny Character instead. At the time this seemed like the smart move.

Unbeknownst to us, this change would create one of the biggest conflicts with our source control. The developer assigned to working on the player naturally deleted the old model and replaced it with manny. Once the weapon swap functionality had been added, the developer committed and push their changes. On their machine, the player character worked fine. It was when the rest of the team did their pull did we realize something was wrong.

For whatever reason, this change broke the game for everyone minus the author. Agnostic to anything we tried, Unreal would religiously crash on start up. This issue caused the team to turn internal and spend over ten hours trying to rectify this issue.

<Image of the error output>

The Solution

Sadly, this story does not have a happy ending. Amidst our best efforts, we were unable to solve this issue. To make matters worse, time was against as well as we had merely 12 hours to wrap up and deliver the prototype. What we ultimately decided was to have the player character developer finish what he had started with the character and then proceed to wrap up the game loop. All the other developers reverted back in order to make final tweaks to items such as the UI. Once the gameplay loop and the character were done, the other team members took turns coordinating with the player character developer, walking them through the necessary edits to finish the other portions of the game.

<Image of our prototype>

Feelings are bitter sweet at the moment. We were successful in that we submitted the prototype on time but dismayed because we were not able to add everything we had wanted for the prototype. Moving forward, we are not 100% sure what we are going to do. On one hand we don't want to lose a ton of work but on the  other hand we need to be able to work on the same game. We are definitely going to be spending some time reflecting on what the best course of action will be.