The final week is upon us and with it brings us... stress, lots and lots of stress, the team took a well deserved break over the Christmas holidays. As we came back Holly drew up this diagram for herself detailing what she was doing over the Christmas break and so the whole team decided to add to it and use it as a kind of final backlog of tasks that needed to be done before submission.
For myself the biggest things that I had to do during this last period was to do with asset development, Level Design and programming. It was at this stage in development that we were all starting to feel the crunch of development. However having the above system proved to work really well for us as we were planning out day by day what had to be done.
If I had to pick out the biggest thing I feel both myself and the team struggled with it was getting all of the revamped levels fully completed to their final polished stages, This was mostly due to re-occuring bugs when it came to level streaming, and optimisation errors.
Optimisation errors
Just to go over the main issue that we seemed to have in this final stretch it was without a doubt the optimisation errors that we encountered when we tried to package to the Oculus headset. The game itself didn't run bad however we kept running into frequent crashes even before the game had loaded and we still can't figure out exactly why, as we have done everything we can as a team to try an optimise the game to the fullest. i do have to mention that Josh took on the vast majority of the work when it came to trying to get the game to run natively on the Quest, he had tried and tested for a good solid two days but to no avail. With time running out and the deadline approaching we had to settle for not being able to package our game which was incredibly frustrating but it is just something we had to take on the chin.
Level Streaming errors
Linking into the optimisation errors then was that certain bugs were occurring with level streaming within unreal where certain nav meshes wouldn't build or objects were missing but this just became a game of going through each level and making sure that they were all within the correct sub level that they were supposed to be in.
Reflecting on how we dealt before submission:
I have to admit that the team did some really stupid things coming up to development as we all crunched way too hard and pulled a good few all nighters together to get the product to a state where it was ready, however our biggest problem as a team was that we didn't know when to stop as up until the deadline everyone was just polishing everything they had already completed and i feel like this may have added some unnecessary stress
Reflecting on the team and the project as a whole:
Overall I have to say that it has been nothing but a pleasure to work alongside every member of this group, I can't think of an instance where the team ran into any infighting issues or of team members not pulling their weight. The communication between everyone was top notch and this project has made some incredible new friends for all of us. I hope that I get to work with this lot more in the future as they are the most talented bunch of people I know. As for the project I feel that again it has turned out fantastic mostly due to how hard and well the team worked together. The only criticism I can say is that this team doesn't know when to stop with new ideas and mechanics, we were all so bad for spit balling ideas and then trying to implement them leading to some unnecessary work but sure it all ended well
While the project is by no means perfect it is definitely something to be proud of, I feel looking back at my own performance that I did well in the roles I took and the opportunities I was given. While I know that I was not perfect at all in this there were times when I could have done more work or I could have improved something but didn't but I would be lying if I said that everything went flawlessly and the project couldn't have been any better. but I am extremely proud of what I have managed to accomplish within this team and can't wait to the next project rolls around.
- L
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