16-17/5 Final Days Of Game Project 2
This is the final blog entry I will make for this project, as the time is up and the game complete. I will now cover the last one and a half days that concluded the project.
On Thursday, we knew that we had to get everything done on that very day, as we would not have the time to do any major fixes or implementations on the day after since it was then we would hold our official presentation to our teachers, high school students and several key people from the school board, some of which being potential employers.
One of these implementations was to get the polished version of the level with all the rooms into the game, light baking and setting light positions and also fixing the final bugs of the AI and optimizing it as much as possible. On top of that, the designers of the team (meaning me and my co-designer) had to concentrate on rehearsing and constructing of the presentation, play-testing and just simply managing the project by making decisions on how to resolve all of our last-minute problems.
About half of our team chose to stay over after school hours to work on the game. Because of this, we even managed to change a lot of the UI elements in-game and in the menu interface which made it turn out much better. The AI also got done on that day late in the evening, as we soon noticed that the problem with the AI was mostly because of the navmesh rather than an issue with the code. It was a bit of a headscratcher, but we managed to finish it later in the evening.
On the next day we were all significantly stressed, mostly due to the fact that the light and light-baking did not turn out as what we intended and we had to consult the teachers to help us out with this. The problem was due to a limitation of the in-house engine we were using though, as it could not handle so much detail that our artists intended it to be. They did their best to fix this, however and the game turned out to look decent enough at least.
We also had some sound issue, some of which did not get fixed in time for the presentation. We are still quite unsure why these errors occur however as the sound bank and the game code seemed to both be correct. All-in-all, the sound turned out well enough however.
But apart from these problems, everything seemed to work just fine and we all spent the final hours before the presentation to optimize the game as much as possible by sniffing out technical and visual bugs in the game and refining everything in need of it.
In the afternoon, we held our presentation. The presentation was not by any means perfect, but for the purpose of it and in the light of things, I have no regrets about it. It went as good as it could have, considering the circumstances.
Apparently, the school board will announce a winner next week, where they will decree what game they though was best of the three games that were presented by as and the other two teams. They also mentioned that the winning team will receive a grand price, which also is a bit exciting.
But yes, that is it for this project! These past 9 weeks has been a truly educational experience for me and I will definitely benefit for everything I have learned working on it, especially with people I did not know that well. The game might not have turned out exactly how we wanted, but I think we are all satisfied with we we manged to create in such a short time with the limitations and circumstances we worked under.
This has been a bit of an experiment of mine to document the progress we made and also experiment in writing style and length to use as reference for my next blog. As you might have noticed, I'm very new to blog-writing. Without any doubt, writing consistently every single day about one thing, is time-consuming and hard for those that are not used to it and is in great need of a consistent structure.
Next project, I will plan my structure up before hand and try to use it consistently throughout the course of the project, with the use of a lot more visual aid whenever it is applicable.
Thank you very much for reading!
Samuel K.
On Thursday, we knew that we had to get everything done on that very day, as we would not have the time to do any major fixes or implementations on the day after since it was then we would hold our official presentation to our teachers, high school students and several key people from the school board, some of which being potential employers.
One of these implementations was to get the polished version of the level with all the rooms into the game, light baking and setting light positions and also fixing the final bugs of the AI and optimizing it as much as possible. On top of that, the designers of the team (meaning me and my co-designer) had to concentrate on rehearsing and constructing of the presentation, play-testing and just simply managing the project by making decisions on how to resolve all of our last-minute problems.
About half of our team chose to stay over after school hours to work on the game. Because of this, we even managed to change a lot of the UI elements in-game and in the menu interface which made it turn out much better. The AI also got done on that day late in the evening, as we soon noticed that the problem with the AI was mostly because of the navmesh rather than an issue with the code. It was a bit of a headscratcher, but we managed to finish it later in the evening.
On the next day we were all significantly stressed, mostly due to the fact that the light and light-baking did not turn out as what we intended and we had to consult the teachers to help us out with this. The problem was due to a limitation of the in-house engine we were using though, as it could not handle so much detail that our artists intended it to be. They did their best to fix this, however and the game turned out to look decent enough at least.
We also had some sound issue, some of which did not get fixed in time for the presentation. We are still quite unsure why these errors occur however as the sound bank and the game code seemed to both be correct. All-in-all, the sound turned out well enough however.
But apart from these problems, everything seemed to work just fine and we all spent the final hours before the presentation to optimize the game as much as possible by sniffing out technical and visual bugs in the game and refining everything in need of it.
In the afternoon, we held our presentation. The presentation was not by any means perfect, but for the purpose of it and in the light of things, I have no regrets about it. It went as good as it could have, considering the circumstances.
Apparently, the school board will announce a winner next week, where they will decree what game they though was best of the three games that were presented by as and the other two teams. They also mentioned that the winning team will receive a grand price, which also is a bit exciting.
But yes, that is it for this project! These past 9 weeks has been a truly educational experience for me and I will definitely benefit for everything I have learned working on it, especially with people I did not know that well. The game might not have turned out exactly how we wanted, but I think we are all satisfied with we we manged to create in such a short time with the limitations and circumstances we worked under.
This has been a bit of an experiment of mine to document the progress we made and also experiment in writing style and length to use as reference for my next blog. As you might have noticed, I'm very new to blog-writing. Without any doubt, writing consistently every single day about one thing, is time-consuming and hard for those that are not used to it and is in great need of a consistent structure.
Next project, I will plan my structure up before hand and try to use it consistently throughout the course of the project, with the use of a lot more visual aid whenever it is applicable.
Thank you very much for reading!
Samuel K.
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