Monday 12th – The Team Call

This team call aimed to work on fixing the groups communication and work through any other problems last minute with Sophie’s guidance.

The call was quick and we got up to speed with what everyone is doing, I let everyone know what I had been up to and what there was to do since I had made a checklist over the weekend.

We were told to assign ourselves tasks and work on what was deemed most important in order to have a playable game. She again reassured us that it will all work out, even if the game crashes or is buggy. Being able to reflect on it together, it was clear to us now that making such big changes in week 9 was not ideal.

One of the biggest bumps in miscommunication was updates not being shared while developing the second version of the game resulting in the rest of the team not being aware that the tutorial and the fail state of the game had been removed, which made having a working gameloop kind of impossible in the state the game was in. Joe also mentioned a pretty big problem I had noticed while working on the project where the player’s progress was not saving as the player jumped from the game scene to the narrative scene. This was an issue he said he’d spent a long time on and one that he would probably need another 2 weeks to complete, I hadn’t really looked into it and suggested I could have a look at it.

Joe was tasked to work on wrapping the game up in a way that it could be played from start to finish and I took on smaller tasks such as making a main menu, adding sound, last bits of UI and dealing any other issues that I could with the help of Rosie and Gabi. I stated that from now on I would constantly update the team on what tasks I had completed to avoid any and all confusion.

I can’t confidently say that we will be able to submit a game that can be played from start to finish, but at the very least it’s a good attempt at a game that tries to do that.

My work following the call:

Those Left Behind V2 Pt. 2

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Tuesday 13th

I got an absolute ton done today, so I’m well chuffed — as the Brits like to say! Tomorrow is the last full day of work on this project I have so my two absolute main goals are to hopefully fix progress not saving between scenes and completing the remaining character dialogue. Character dialogue will undoubtedly be easy since I plan to enlist the help of my teammates to work through it together, the real mountain is the save.

Work of the day:

Those Left Behind V2 Pt. 3

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Wednesday 14th – Last Full Day

Another super productive day, Ross was our champion and rescued us for eternal doom. The narrative dialogue scenes were complete and smaller UI bugs were squashed. Joe had completed his tasks and we were able to successfully merge our respective branches to create the game.

While we were able to fix the save issue, the task progression save is now having unexpected bugs.

Those Left Behind V2 Pt. 4

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Thursday 15th – Last Hours

Ross was able to help me during the Thursday tech session for emergency surgeries. We plan to upload the build right after it was working. As I was the only year 2 that came in for help, Ross was able to prioritise fixing the bug. In the end, the problem was that a completeTask() function was not being called in the right place at the right time. While the game was undergoing surgery, I set up an itch.io page for the game.

We had to test multiple builds due to issues with the playerprefs not saving properly, meaning that the game was saved even after you quit the or went back to main menu, which was not intended. All data should be wiped when the player leaves the main game scene. Ross was also able to help with this and was compensated greatly with a Cadbury’s milktray (thanks again Ross!)

The game isn’t perfect but we have come a long long way over just the last few days. The game had the potential to include many features, had we been more prepared and not overscoped so late.

The game’s shortcomings:

One of the primary fixes would be with the economy, which we hadn’t paid much attention to – upgrade costs and task requirements should have been revised – the economy inbalance (excess of early game resources) creates long and tedious gameplay toward the mid-game and especially the late game. While it’s not the worst, it is annoying. The world time also takes too long, meaning players could complete the game by day 3.

• Sound effects
  • character speech
  • camp sounds – built, upgraded
  • complete task sounds
• No tutorial
• No special effects/animations
• No lose condition

But overall, I think it was a good enough attempt and I’m happy with the work I and the others were able to pull off days before the deadline.

My Final Reflection:

Final Reflection