Week 12 Progress

During week 12, the team's main focus is to finish the Beta code. This week is more heavily in my position as a programmer because it mainly focuses on the implementation and coding part. The environment modeler finished the rest of the environment design for the two other levels and worked on the level design for all two levels. The other team member helped with the checkpoint system that the team decided to add to the game because the levels are quite long and big. In addition, the team also worked on the documents and reports together.

My tasks this week are to implement the rest of the assets such as the remaining levels, checkpoint feature, and two bosses. The remaining levels include the intro level, level 1, and level 3 because the second playtest showcased our level 2. The level implementation includes placing all the prefab assets such as the level models, the player character, enemies, and etc. The implementation is based on our level design diagrams. In addition, another team member helped with the checkpoint feature. The player is able to walk through a checkpoint and the colour of the checkpoint will turn from orange to blue. In addition, the player will respawn in the position of the last checkpoint that the player got when he died. Furthermore, the dialogue system that I coded last week is added to the checkpoint system so it is more noticeable and gives more purpose towards the player to obtain each checkpoint. Lastly, I coded the two bosses of the game. The programming aspect is similar to the normal monster except it has different animations and different stats.

A major problem that I encountered this week was the optimization of game. Especially the last level where there are a lot more enemies and the environment are more detailed and larger in terms of scale. We tried many approaches to try to fix the frame rates include adding occlusion culling. However, the game still drops the frame when the player is in the game for too long. When the game first starts, there is no lag. The team is going to continue to optimization the game before the showcase next week.