Game Project 1: 13/12-2018

Project Name: Laborated, Patient 47 or Lab Rat (Hmmm)

Hello!

Today we were still one programmer short and had one of our most hectic days of the project. Our goal was to get a fully playable version of our game to show to our teachers tomorrow on the sprint review. However, there proved to be a lot of problems with major parts of our game including clipping of meshes and holes in the level, missing or skewed textures, long loading times, slow fps count, and even implementation of the animation for the guard character. At least now we are able to work with the real level even though it needed some major amounts of refining.

We once again only had one programmer who was forced to do all the heavy lifting today. He mostly worked on solving bugs and kept on testing how well the level and the mechanics worked in the game. Because he also worked overtime, he even started experimenting with the lighting of the level.

The artists worked on the level until 14:00 today and otherwise worked on the remainder of props and textures. Our animator got a lot of problems with the joint system and exporting their animations into Tengine as he got several errors from doing that. At the end of the day, we also found out that we had a game breaking bug relating to the animations,  which we are still unsure of how to fix. We have decided to consult our teachers about it tomorrow and use our old animations in the meantime.

 I worked on refining the level all day, looking for visual errors that might break the game experience for the player and clean up all meshes that feels unnecessary to have at all. I worked with this all day yesterday as well and I did the same today too. We keep finding more errors and sometimes it felt like I corrected the same error over and over that kept coming back. I am unsure if it was something I did or if there was something wrong that happened while exporting the file.

Meanwhile, my co-designer worked on writing out all of the guards patrol paths and playtested the level to help me find visual errors. As we were both extremely busy, we did not find any time doing much documenting at all, mainly because we did not find it as important at this time.

Our game is nearing its final state, but bugs and visual errors hinder us from experience the game as it is supposed to be played. As of now though, we are closer than ever before. Even though we will probably not impress any of our teachers tomorrow, I think we are still able to get done with the game by next Friday.

That is all for today, thanks for reading!

// Samuel