Devblog Week 7.5: (03/12/2021)

A surprise half-week update for you all! We got some good news during the week and a few updates for you.

So lets start with the good news. Our Vertical Slice is coming up on the 13th and while the run up to our prototype was very hectic and challenging with all the issues that emerged. We've since learned and have isolated all our issues and are well underway and scheduled to have them all patched out by the time the 13th rolls around which has done wonders for our motivation and mental states.

So lets talk about each of the issues and how we're dealing with them. Firstly one of the biggest issues was our player code, it was spread over 4-5 scripts and 2 gameobjects which was very inefficient and meant a lot of jumping back and forth between scripts as well as an Event manager that was very overengineered and confusing to change. What we've done now however to fix all these issues, is we removed the event manager and combined the scripts into a total of 2 scripts, one for the guns and one for everything else. While not working 100% yet we're at the stage where the movement, gadgets, guns and camera are all working super smoothly and are super happy with it so far.

Another one of the issues that occured was our player model looked extremely lifeless in our prototype due to her being stuck in a T-pose and with no texturing. Sadly we just don't have the time to do both so we decided to prioritise animations first and have nearly finished skinning the model. We hope to have the basic movement animations in for the prototype to really bring the character to life.

On the subject of models though, lets talk about the problems with our other models that came up, for whatever unknown reason our models meshes were not combined in unity properly and this was causing major issues with lighting, texturing and the RAM usage. So we've had to go back through, modfiy and fix all of our models, while not done we're about 40% through and we don't necessarily need all of them to be done for the 13th. This also means we'll have to redo how the buildings are generated in the level. This is partially done but shouldn't be too much more work in the coming week.

Another strange issue happened with our enemy models where after exporting they were filled with loads of additional polys and hve to be shaved back. We reckon this was a triangulation issue but don't quite now exactly.

So far the entire team has been working hard on these things and we are hopeful that our Vertical Slice will be a good representation of our game.