This blog post is to document the final 24 hours of our game development during our final groupwork call.
The final testing session got the entire dev team together in a call to test out the final build of the project before packaging the game. To begin we made it a small and fun competition to try to speed run through the game at the beginning of bug testing and at the end of the night.
We started the fixing and bug finding by looking at the levels and checking each one to see what would need fixed before any packaging attempts could be made. We all decided to strap on the headsets and move through the world, first thing that was broken was the door sequence in the Training area, this was fixed quite easily as one of the nodes had not been connected and broke the entire door opening sequence.
Next, we had to fix the lag that would happen when entering the village, bad frame drops had occurred due to the texture quality being so high on the new replaced rock models. We had lowered the resolution down on these to save on some performance which did indeed up our frames a noticeable amount but still more could be done in terms of optimisation. We focused on the fire particle system next for trying to get more optimisation out of the game, some of us took to looking at alternatives to using it as the game is playable but adjustments needed to be made. We decided to go into the particle system for the flame and turn down some of the effects as well as deleting some of the lighting associated with it.
Next was Sequencers, we noticed that some of the sequencers decided to bug out and not play correctly for some of us but was still not working correctly. These turned out to be small fixes, such as the portal that spawns at the Tower was not playing correctly due to being loaded into the Training area level instead of the Tower level which caused some bother for us until we figured it out. We went to the Temple area next and checked with some of the moving objects in there and noticed one of the puzzles had its Puzzle completed and would reset when pressing down a button, this was a simple fix by moving the object back to its original starting position and did not give bother again. The last Sequencer that needed to be fixed was the boss fight doors, they did not close when the boss was activated so a quick change to reverse the sequence was added when the Ice Crystal was collected by the player and the boss activated, solving the final issue to do with the game’s sequencers.
Next was tinier nit-picking fixes that needed to be added to the game that would be a lot of quality-of-life improvements. First up for the improvements was the inclusion of more health potions, they had been in the world already so it was a matter of testing parts of the level that would leave the player at lower health and seeing if they had potions near or not. I started with the village and had added some potions after the second wave of enemies that the player would fight as after some testing, we had been near death a few times while in the testing phase.
After adding the potions to the level, the second nit-pick of our game was to change the voice volume in the game, some of the lines we had recorded seemed to be a bit quiet when hearing it through the Quest 2 Headset so we went through all the voices that made it into the final game and decided to double the volume of each, making sure to adjust each one when needed to suit the volume.
Next, we noticed the player if they somehow fell out of the level boundaries would continue to fall forever, this was changed by adding in some Kill boxes for the player, which when touched removed all player health in an instance. Some levels after testing more lacked the updated kill boxes so they had to be changed for the player to die.
The shield had been changed last minute as we all noticed when blocking some projectiles, it seemed like the shield was too small for us to block some things such as the spit attack that the Gremlins shot at the player. We talked about what we could do and came up with make the shield only slightly bigger as to not obscure player vision while using the shield and feel we found a sweet spot of size after tweaking for a while.
The game being at last ready to package (after the numerous bug checks, fixes and many optimisation techniques used) became one of the hardest obstacles for us as a team. When attempting to package the game we ran into an issue that had caused the game to constantly crash during the beginning of the Training area for some of the members but even more strangely for others the game would crash during the initial load of the Main Menu. This was indeed a strange issue that left us searching for solutions and troubleshooting the issue for over 8 hours straight to no avail.
Comments