Now that I’ve had a chance to listen to the full recording…
Q&A with Jason “Ikik” Weimann - Senior Programmer
Quick Summary:
They covered lots of development-specific topics.
For programmers, some cool info to dig into.
For non-programmers, it’s still an interesting Q&A.
My main takeaway, as an an amateur (totally non-professional-level) programmer: they’ve got really good, knowledgeable folks working on Pantheon. Makes me pretty confident in their ability to deliver a high-quality product with a solid foundation that will stand the test of time.
Programming (Generally)
Starts off with comments on his/their approach to coding, keeping things separate, ensuring that changes in one system don’t impact others unexpectedly.
Jason puts up lots of videos on YouTube to help people learn programming. Has a Unity mastery course as well.
Learning to code: when you’re just beginning, don’t code alone! Work with others. You’ll learn more and develop knowledge more quickly. See what they’re doing and pick new things up.
Doesn’t like a lot of comments in code. If you need to comment to explain what is going on, may really just need to refactor the code so it is easier to follow. Only real exception is if you need to do something that isn’t obvious for a technical or business reason. Then you’d want to comment.
Pantheon-specific
There haven’t been any big issues that delayed development. They’ve brought some big systems in, and have others in the works they can’t announce yet, but nothing bad.
He worked on a cool function: boomerang. The ability to throw a weapon, have it return back to the thrower, and determine whether anyone is hit on the way out or back. Designed for a specific boss fight, but was coded in a way that it can be applied anywhere – other NPCs or for players too. Again, the approach is to create these abilities in a flexible way so that they can be reused rather than being constrained to a single application.
Funny error he introduced when coding this: bats were flying around with swords. In order to test the boomerang functionality, he enabled weapon visibility so that he would see if it was working. That led to lots of comments from testers when they saw bats flying around with weapons.
The Unity engine can support pretty much anything, including advanced AI, as long as you have the knowledge/ability to code it. For example (as was asked in a question), they could have mobs swarm the entrance of a dungeon after noticing that players have been zerging the entrance. Technically, yes, they could. From a design perspective, though, it may not be something they want to do. They can have a mix of scripted encounters and AI-based decisions. Have to balance that, from a fantasy perspective. The programmers can create the options, but they’ll leave that up to the designers on what they choose to implement.
Climbing: Someone else (Kyle) is reworking the mob pathing system to work with the new climbing system. [Design’s note: This scares me. Mobs pursuing with the ability to climb = cannot escape! ]
His goal is to give the design team all of the functionality they’ll need. Things like damage reflect, counter-spell, spell redirects, requiring multiple interrupts to stop a powerful spell, etc. He wants to support every type of thing you’d see in games like D&D and Magic: The Gathering. Make it all available so that the design team can play around.
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