During the final week of vertical slice, I worked on finalising and polishing my level design. I spent a lot of time also finding and fixing bugs within the game to ensure that it is fully playable. I added a new text display to show the player how much money they have collected when picking up coins and trophies. I also incorporated a Perlin shake function onto the text to make it shake whenever the player picked up money and the money count increased. This provided extra feedback to the player when collecting money. I also made the text fade out after a specified amount of time of not collecting any money. This is due to the fact that one of the aims of our game is to minimise UI elements as much as possible. I also changed the alarm system to trigger a door to open and set a list of guards to chase the player. This occurs after the player triggers a laser beam.
Due to the fact that my scene is the largest of the three for vertical slice I also had to optimise the level to cull objects which were not seen by the player. To do this I split my scene into 2 worlds which would enable and disable all objects within each world depending on where the player was in the scene. This worked effectively and increased performance within my scene. Finally, I also added a cut scene for the end of my level which switches to a second camera that shows the player taking off in their van as the guards try and stop him. This will be the final ending to our vertical slice level. Personal Reflection: Now that our vertical slice is completed, I am very proud after looking back at what we have achieved as a team as well as individuals. There have been many times during the vertical slice where we were unsure of the exact direction that the game was heading in and it was hard to see how the game would function with the combination of everything that we had been working on. Thankfully within the final week and a half of development, we managed to combine all mechanics and art into a level split up into three sections which is fun to play through and shows off the majority of the mechanics which we intended to implement. There are a variety of aspects of our game and production process which I am very proud of. One of these is the fact that we as programmers set out to make our systems within the game as modular and easy to use as possible. I believe that we successfully achieved this as the majority of our mechanics such as grapple swings, alarm systems, doors, lasers and AI have all been designed in a way which makes them easy to set up and use within future level design. I am also proud of the way in which we worked together as a team and communicated with one another to complete each of the tasks that we set out to do. We were rigorous with our planning for each week and the effective use of our team production plan ensured that we were always on track and knew exactly what we had to be working on. I was also proud that the team took our game down to Armageddon to have it play tested and get feedback on things to improve. This greatly helped our production as it allowed us to get feedback on the perspectives of others who played our game which could then be worked on to make the game better. On a more personal level there are a few aspects of the game which I am very pleased to have contributed to. The mechanic that I am proudest of implementing within the game is the grapple mechanic. I took this mechanic on board for the entirety of the vertical slice and continuously made an effort to optimise it and make it feel as smooth and satisfying for the player as possible. I spent many hours on this mechanic to get it to feel the way that it does in the current state of the game and I am very happy with how fluid and satisfying it feels to grapple within the game. A lot of thought went into this mechanic to perfect it and maximise its use within the game. For example, the way in which it prioritises grapples within the player’s view, pulls the player up when grappling from the ground, and the way in which it provides constant feedback via the line renderer and button prompts to make it easy for the player to notice them and use them. I was very happy when the majority of play testers told us that this was their favourite mechanic within the game and the one which they wanted to see more of. I was also very proud of my level design within the final level of the game. I placed a lot of time and effort in planning object positions and guard patrol routes in this level and I am very happy with the way in which the level plays out as a whole. I am also particularly happy with the end cut scene that I made for the player leaving the level in their space craft. I am also proud of the external saving and loading which I have implemented into the game using JSON. This can be expanded upon in the future to create a more elaborative saving system in the future. There were a couple of mechanics that I worked on which did not make it into the game at this point, however I am still happy with the way that they turned out. These mechanics include the ventilation system which would allow players to traverse the scene by entering and exiting vents as well as the over world car driving implementation which was super fun to drive around in. Hopefully in the production process we will be able to incorporate these mechanics into the game. There were however some aspects of the vertical slice which did not go to plan and there were times when we made some mistakes. One of the biggest challenges for me was the fact that for a long time our game seemed to have little direction as we had many mechanics which we wanted to implement into the game however were unsure of exactly how they would interact with one another when playing the game. We also initially over scoped the vertical slice process by trying to incorporate an elaborate story within the game. Initially we designed our vertical slice level to follow a story line and this caused us to waste a lot of time on a level which would at the end of the day not actually be used. However, as a team we were able to overcome these obstacles and at the end of the day have a successful vertical slice to show for it. I think that one aspect we can work on as a team is our use of time management when working on the game in the future. On a more personal level there were some mistakes which I made along the vertical slice process. One of these mistakes was when I was not willing to give up on the “arm physics” within the game. I wasted a lot of time on this mechanic within the game before realising that it was not the ideal thing to use within our game. I also failed to stick to the coding naming standards which we had set out to use at times during development and this is something I would like to improve upon in the future. On a whole I am very happy with the way that our vertical slice turned out. There were many lessons learnt along the way and it has been a great experience to work in a team environment over such a long period of time. I am confident in our team and our ability to further improve the game during the production phase to come.
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