Missing Assets - Jonathan Kohl

During this week I spent much time working on a new ranged guard character. This character required all new assets, animations, and materials that I imported into the project from the Unreal Engine store. This character was similar to the standard melee guard only with altered variables to the base class and an all-new weapon that I needed to create, the crossbow. After hours creating this character, it was finally done. I began to test the AI ensuring my quality of work. Once I was satisfied with my work, I pushed the new character to the repository. 

The character was in the main map for a few days prior to the build, nobody reported any discrepancies with the new character. That is until the day of the build. After everyone began pulling the latest revision, everyone on the team excluding myself could not see the crossbow in the guard's hands. They also were not getting any expected behavior from the ranged guard, effectively the guard was entirely broken. 

 In desperate efforts to fix this issue in hopes to recover my work I began force pushing all scripts associated with the ranged guard. I also forced pushed my Ranged Guard blueprint in hopes that this would resolve the problem. I then requested everyone to force a get revision on the source file that houses all of our scripts and a force get revision on the blueprint of ranged guard. Even after this still everyone's ranged guard was still in the same broken state. 

I then had a suspicion on what the issue could be. I asked a team member who was sharing their screen to open the blueprint of the ranged town guard. We observed that none of the skeletal meshes, or materials for the bolt or crossbow were being set. I told my teammate the file path where these assets could be found but they were no longer in the project. Somewhere along the build prosses assets got deemed unnecessary and got discarded from the project, consequently this broke my ranged guard character. Luckly I still had all of these assets saved to my local repository. 

After I pushed the skeletal meshes, and materials. A new build was begun when I realized if all my materials and meshes were deleted; the animations probably got deleted also. I was correct in this assumption and immediately notified the team of the final issue with the ranged guard. Animations were deemed unnecessary to warrant another build, so effectively my ranged guard was still incomplete for the second milestone submission. Luckly I was still able to fix the majority of the issues and get the opportunity to display the majority of the work that I did on this new character. I did still push the animations back to the remote repository, so currently everyone has the most updated version of the ranged guard.