Seams - Week 10

Hello and welcome back to what may be one of the last blog posts for Seams. This week I've been busy finally finishing up what had been started as well as preparing for the end of this assignment; reflecting on what went wrong, what went right, and what I should do for the final week.

This week's assignment

This week I finally finished off my work on Level 1, marking that segment of the game fully playable, albeit untested and probably quite buggy. Regardless, all events have been programmed and all dialogue should be present.

Additionally, I made a basic main menu so that anyone playtesting the current build of the game won't get disoriented by the game starting into the story immediately. Since I don't have any assets for a main menu I just used some default buttons on an empty background but when a design is done it will be easy enough to just throw it in with functionality staying the same. Have a little look at the menu below:

I have also implemented a loading system that takes what scene you want to load into and loads it asynchronously using SceneManager.LoadSceneAsync(). What this means is that Unity will start loading the destination scene in the background while the current scene is still running. Allowing me to place a loading screen to the player with a functional progress bar. I did this more as a precaution as with past experience having the amount of sprites and objects in the scene that I currently have causes the game to take quite a while to transition from another scene into that, especially for the first time which ends up making the game look like it froze. This also makes the transition between two scenes a little nicer looking and a bit more seamless.

Reflection

This was the second to last week of our project, and looking at the game now, with the fact that we have only one more week to officially work on this game, shows that I definitely made a few mistakes in the earlier days of development. Firstly, I didn't quite plan out my priorities too well, additionally in that regard I could've balanced work between myself and the other programmer better too, keeping up with their progress more often than I actually did. I also spent way too much time working on level 1. Part of this was due to my random refusal to work on it without the finished visitors room for some reason I can't even recall. But also due to my generally slow pace with working on it.

Something else I inconveniently had only just remembered this week was that we needed to record all of our playtests. I don't really have an official format for playtesting and at the time I was in a hurry so when I started testing changes I just noted down in bullet points what happened during the session.

I'm hoping that recording all of my future playtests will be enough but this is a pretty serious thing to just forget about for 10 weeks so my bad on that front.

That's all there is to show for this week. Next week will be the last for this blog, and will come with the release of what we've worked on so far as a demo for the game. So look forward to that and once again, thank you for keeping up with the development of this game up to this point.