CS3247 Project Development Plan

Segregation of Duties

• Map & Exploration: Chengzhen & Gerard

• Combat: Yiwen & Yuxiang

• Card Crafting: Puyu & Yirui

• UI: Unassigned during the prototyping phase.

Workflow

Main Protection Rules

• The main branch is protected and no direct commit should be made to it.

• Create a separate branch to implement and test new features.

• Open a pull request to merge a branch to the main branch.

Branch Naming Conventions

• A branch should be named by the author's name.

• If you want to indicate the feature being worked on in the branch, include a short description in a bracket.

• Preferably, spell the branch name with all lower-case letters.

• Example: puyu (card crafting recipes).

Project Management

• Team meeting at 14:00 every Monday to update previous week's progress and next week's plan.

• We use Jira for team management.

• Create a Jira issue for every piece of work and let Jira track your commits.

• Jira issue types:

  • Feature: Ideas/suggestions for new features.

  • Bug: Bug fixes.

  • Task: New features currently being worked on. Every task requires a deadline.

• Jira issue labels:

  • In-Progress: Actively worked on.

  • Need-Help: Stuck and need help.

  • Abandoned: Development is stopped and another person hopefully can take this over.

  • Pending-Test: Completed but waiting to be tested.

• Useful links:

  • Reference Jira Issues when Committing

  • UE5 Coding Standards

  • UE5 C++ Scripting

Things to Implement

In each category, the items are ranked in descending importance.

• Map & Exploration (2 persons before 2 Mar, 1 person after)

  • 1st person movement

  • Enemy encounters

  • Procedural dungeon generation

  • Player inventory

  • Interactable objects (e.g. treasure chests, collectibles)

• Combat (2 persons)

  • Turn-based combat loop

  • Playing cards

  • Enemy AI

  • Loot & reward system

  • Enemy intent

• Card Crafting (2 persons before 2 Mar, 1 person after)

  • Data containers for cards and card effects

  • Data containers for recipes and resources

  • Single-card crafting

  • Card effect crafting

  • Destroying cards

• UI (2 persons starting from 2 Mar)

  • Save & Load system and UI

  • Card UI

  • Player & enemy status UI

  • Craft station UI

  • Recipe, resources and card effect icons

  • Pause menus etc.

Rough Timeline

Important Dates

• 7 Mar: prototyping phase presentation - need a MVP by then.

• 28 Mar: alpha phase presentation - need a playable level by then.

• 31 Mar: beta phase executable - need to complete first round of play-testing and fix major bugs by then.

• 18 Apr: final presentation - have 2.5 weeks to polish everything.

Plan

Note: up until 2 Mar, there's not much to do for UI so whoever has the free time just do it. After the prototyping presentation, we start implementing the UI properly by allocating 2 persons.

• By 23 Feb:

  • Map & Exploration: implement player movement and have a small test scene

  • Combat: implement a dummy enemy and dummy cards. Implement the turn-based combat loop to test

  • Card crafting: implement data containers for cards and card effects

  • UI: have a simple main menu

• By 2 Mar:

  • Map & Exploration: implement enemy encounters (re-use the dummy enemy from previous week to test)

  • Combat: implement simple enemy actions and basic AI (e.g. purely random selection).

  • Card crafting: implement single-card crafting

  • UI: have a simple menu to view the player's deck

• By 7 Mar (Prototype): test and debug to make sure everything works.

• By 16 Mar (more time due to mid-term week):

  • Map & Exploration: implement procedural map generation and random placement of enemy encounter events.

  • Combat: polish enemy AI into a full-fledged version.

  • Card crafting: implement card-effect crafting. Add some basic recipes.

  • UI: Implement Card UI and player/enemy status (e.g. health bars etc.). Make sure they are responsive to combat events. Implement save & load.

• By 23 Mar:

  • Map & Exploration: implement a player inventory system for cards and resources.

  • Combat: implement loot & reward system after a combat ends. Make sure the system interacts with the inventory system well.

  • Card crafting: implement destroying cards

  • UI: implement icons for recipes, resources and card effects. Implement craft station UI for card crafting. Implement save & load.

• By 29 Mar (Alpha):

  • Map & Exploration: implement treasure chests and merchant.

  • Combat: implement enemy intents. Design a few enemy types and a boss enemy for Alpha presentation.

  • Card crafting: add more recipes and card effects for Alpha presentation.

  • UI: implement the rest of the craft station UI. Implement save & load.

• By 31 Mar (Beta): play-test and fix bugs.

• By 11 Apr:

  • Map & Exploration: implement more interactable objects and collectibles (e.g. adventurer journals to enhance game lore, corpses which can be searched for loot etc.)

  • Combat: design more enemy types and in particular bosses.

  • Card crafting: polish anything which needs polishing and help with other parts.

  • UI: enhance aesthetics, add a game setting menu.

• By 18 Apr (Final): play-test and fix bugs.