Hey! It's Hunter, and it's time for postmortems.

As mentioned before, I am one of the three main programmers for Cavin' Hats! It's hard to believe this project - and semester as a whole - is almost over. It's been super fun working on this project, and I definitely learned a lot about properly using functions within blueprints.

As far as time goes, I personally have 18 hours on the Kanban board. Admittedly, the board this time around wasn't as filled out or planned as last time. I don't know exactly how much time I spent on this, but considering there were at least 6-7 nights where I tried to figure something out for 4+ hours, I'd say I'm sitting around the 30-35 range. There was a LOT of bug fixing to do this time around, and it became one of those situations where when you fix one thing, another thing breaks. That's just how it is :P

My work includes helping start the push/pull block, adding in functional settings for the game (i.e. video settings, audio settings, and keybinds), and adding in all of the menus and widgets for the game. The one big thing I worked the most on was dialogue. I wasn't expecting it to take as long as it did, though I probably should have considering I completely scrapped the simpler idea my professor gave us. Instead of using a data table for dialogue, I decided to make a dialogue system, complete with audio and animation support. Huge, HUGE thank you to Michael Pattison on Youtube for having such a great and in-depth dialogue tutorial series; I seriously wouldn't have been able to figure this out without him.

Since the dialogue system is so big, that's what all of my BlueprintUE links below will be for: specifically, each function that's used in the base dialogue actor component. Children of this component would be used for each individual NPC, and the NPC's themselves would have the AC assigned to them.

Open Conversation: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/w3cy2xbb/

Close Conversation: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/0p5mn-4n/

Progress Dialogue: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/h4y8wfsm/

Dialogue: This would remain blank in the base actor component, but be filled out within any children.

Add Dialogue: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/c0c9zxwf/

Update Selected Option: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/h33_q17-/

Clear Dialogue Progress: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/er2tqkrc/

Remove Dialogue Progress: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/9a8xi_ng/

Set Dialogue Branch: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/dr-g_k79/

Play Dialogue Audio: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/b-k6n5h3/

Assign Generic Montage: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/k_kjn9uz/

Auto Progress: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/--bciayk/

Load Dialogue Data: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/lxitzmlu/

Get Save Slot Name: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/5cy20hei/

Update Saved Data: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/1balh--e/

Save Dialogue Data:  https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/l9m39711/

Honestly, the most difficult part of all of this was working with the custom gamemode, game instance, and working with save data. This stuff is all still pretty new to me, so I definitely want to play around with them a bit more to understand them better. Trying to do stuff with the player character when there were two characters was a little confusing too; I've only ever worked in singleplayer.

All in all, I'm very happy with how this project came out. There are definitely a number of issues and bugs to be addressed, but for the time we were given, I think we did pretty good! I'm especially happy I was able to get the dialogue working alongside everyone else's code.