After looking at my game from a non experienced perspective I’ve realised that I need to do several improvements to show players how the game works.
– One of these improvements is the starting map, this is facing behind the player and after many attempts I cannot seem to make it work alongside my controls to move with the camera. This is something that I unfortunately couldn’t get in for the hand out but will for the degree show.
– Secondly I will be improving the end part of the level after you have collected the items to show the player where they must go next which is the screenshot below, this is the power station which is labeled on the map but not for the player, I firstly wanted to see if the player would move to the rig after collecting one of each item and seen as the Rig is seen I was hoping the player would naturally go there and after seeing the green halo move over to there but after letting a few family members have a play this was not the case, also when the player does reach the power station they’re not told what button to press or where to press it, in actually fact the player must jump into the hole next to the electrical box and press B which will activate the elevator at the rig, this is again can’t be seen or isn’t being fed back to the player so they don’t know what it is done other than the fact the 1 next to each item will disappear. This was something at first I wanted to see if players would move from the power station and notice the green light being lit on the rig elevator, but again something I missed was that the player hasn’t passed this elevator to reach any items so will not know to go there. This is something I will hopefully refine and give the players at the degree show a fully working Alpha version of the game RIG with good game flow.
– Also having more on screen texts to show the player where they are going so it allows players who want to finish the level to do it but making the exploring part optionally for players wishing to do so.
– Another slight adjustment I noticed was at the beginning of the game the tutorial tells the player to enter the 3rd container on the left just before entering the city, now some players would find this quite easily but others may have trouble as on the right entrance there is a shack in the way of the player seeing the containers and this may affect the flow of the game.
– Also Changing the button for the map from M to open and N to close to only be binded to one button, this was for simple prototype sake and so I will be changing them to be one button. alongside this I will be reworking the map to give a more accurate position of where the player is when they pick up the map and where the items are. Initially I made the map so I knew were everything was and how the map looked but I didn’t realise that other new players may not because the they have no idea how the level looks or is laid out. But again this is something I wanted to improve on for the degree show and wanted to put in the hand in but my time was being managed on the core gameplay.
– PERFORMANCE! – My games performance increased and ran at a steady FPS in most places but still needs to be running smoother, especially since my computer can handle a lot more than most, unfortunately my Unity Pro trial ran out before I had time to rebuild the Occlusion culling on final time and the Pro version contains most of the assets to improve performance, I was hoping to use college computers but the versions at college and my home are different and so I couldn’t work on the same project at home and at college. So my next step is to look into manually improving my games performance but I will talk about this in more detail in a later post.
– Finally I will be refining down the collision detection to be more precise so there isn’t anything sticking out that could affect the players movement. for example the ladders use a mesh collider so as the player climbs they will stop every so often, I could improve this by adding a box collision instead so the it becomes a much more smooth transaction.
There are many other changes I will be implementing to give my level a much more ‘Tutorial’ feel to it and give the players a positive experience to want to play more of this game. Basically trying to improve on Game Flow rather than the mechanics which are already implemented and ready for the hand in, so next is to improve game flow ready for the degree show.
THE BLOG 