The unglamorous parts...

A lot of the build updates reach this point in development. The cool to look at, easy to screenshot and easy to post about things are done and I'm neck deep in blueprint work.

Just to give a quick rundown of the screenshots.

There's the test level where I add all the necessary pieces to test out a quest. This way I don't have to run across the map, go through buildings, or spend time finding quest objects. Everything is right there in front of me so it's easy to make a change, test, then fix and keep moving. The problem is this is a completely 'clean' level. There aren't other random NPCs, or random spawns, or even the loading between interior and exterior areas. Which all of those things have a possibility of breaking something somehow somewhere.

Then I've got my endless checklists of things to do. This is one of the smaller more organized ones and I've got physical paper notebooks scattered everywhere around me with my illegible handwriting and notes too.

The behavior tree for the cave imps. There's a highlighted branch of their logic to react to a crime, check the reputation to the player, then react to it. There was a bug earlier this week where things seemed to be working - the imps would get pissed at the player and go hostile when the player did some criminal activity. Fine, perfect! But then with further testing and a few imps spawned into the scene things started to break. The player would get a little bit too far away and then the imps would all turn on each other and start fighting amongst themselves. Which was pretty funny but was because the reputation check was overwriting to everybody and not just the player character. I'm pretty sure that's fixed now.

Then the dialogue tree. The one in the screenshot is just the first imp guard in the cave. The blue nodes are player dialogue options and the black nodes and the NPC responses. This is a relatively straightforward one. It's also too zoomed out to see the scripting triggers that go into something like the starfish scene. But then those scripting nodes are connecting to other blueprints that perform actions like playing animations, vfx, or lots of other things.

The quest stages blueprint which is used for the major quest milestones. This one shows part of the main imp cave quest and the solutions flags. It doesn't show the smaller intermediate quest flags and checks along the road to completing the quest.

The player reputation lookup blueprint this is pretty new and is a way of handling how a faction or location or group of NPCs will react to the player. It also keeps track of if that group has a bounty on the player or if / when they'll be hostile to them.

And then the screenshot of me trying to keep track of everything and put it all together in my head. Not pictured is all of the coffee. The sweet, sweet, coffee.

So yeah...

The next build is definitely coming along and I think it's close but it's very difficult for me to gauge time frames when I'm in the middle of this blueprint stage. I don't know how programmers or designers work here all the time. Like it's fun for me to visit but I'm so ready to get back to sculpting or animating again. But yeah, this is usual the point in a build where I'm a bit stressed out and my update posts get shorter and don't have cool pictures - just wanted to let everyone know why that is and what's going on "behind the scenes" to cause any text only posts!

Alright, that's enough typing. I'm back to working on quest triggers for the day.