The end of the second to last day on the project, and the last workday, has come to a close. Not much has been done today as most of the work had to be finished yesterday. This was due to the environmental artists doing the final lightbake, which would require a lot of time.

Most of the group spent the final hours chilling and talking to one another because of this, having a good time in general.

But tomorrow is the official final day of the project, and I look forward to it being over. Not due to it being boring or not fun, but just to have another finished project for my portfolio. Also because the project has taken a lot out of me and I’m awaiting some long-needed rest.

Like that, we only have one more day of working left before the project is done.

A lot of the final assets are finally in game and the game is now looking better than ever. The final lighting is also being baked into the scenes, with a few hiccups, but is coming along nontheless.

As for what has happened with us designers, most of today has been spent on looking for some final bugs and tweaking the last few issues.
Some quality of life choices has also been made, like the invincibility when taking leathal damage and a small camera tilt upon being damaged.
Us level designers also fixed the spawnpoints of enemies, effectively killing the so called ‘roof gang’ for good.

Other than that, just a lot of things rolling in.

Another day down as the end of the project is staring us down.

But for today I was mostly bug hunting as there aren’t many other tasks left before we’re done. I did, however, also work on the minimap again as it seemed to revert back to the old version even after I updated it yesterday. I changed a few other things with it as it continued to change again afterwards. I suspected it had something to do with the custom pivots it had, which was correct. After letting each of the squares keep their pivots, the rooms remained permanent as they should.

During my bughunting I also found that enemies would disappear when you get too far away from them and would reappear upon getting closer again. This led to some laughs being had, including the reemergence of the thought that the game has some potential as a horror game.

Another bug that was found and quickly squashed came along with a function to help optimize the game for Playstation 4. This function would remove rooms and enemies that are too far away from the player as well as reappearing when the player got close. Though the bug that came along with it was that after killing all enemies, the function would pause and lock the player inside three or four rooms. This meant that the players would sometimes be locked out of getting to the next floor.
Thankfully, this was an easy fix for the programmers, so it is now working as intended and will hopefully reduce the strain on the Playstation 4.

With that ends yet another day.

Week nine has now begun, meaning that we are officially in the endgame now.

Though rather than the usual playtesting, the entirety of my day was spent on tweaking the User Interface. The tasks that this included was making sure everything was symmetrical and looked neat.

As part of the UI we have a minimap, which originally had been hastily made and therefore not completely symmetrical. To ensure I placed all of the squares in the map symmetrically, I made sure to calculate exactly where everything would have to optimally be placed. I was also asked to make the map transparent as well as adding a different border. Yet in the end, we went with the simple background rather than a frame, as it was the least distracting of the options.

Other than that, I also shifted the upgrade menu slightly along with the info menu. It wasn’t much I shifted them as it was a very minor issue but still an issue. We also have buttons for which upgrade the player wants to chose, which were the same size as when we first implemented the upgrades. The upgrade choices has gone through some changes, so the buttons no longer fit them.

Now that the day has come to a close, I have managed to tweak the UI to a good point. Though the day ending also means one day less to finish the game. But I trust in my groupmates that we’ll finish it on time.

The eighth week has come to an end, meaning the final week is upon us after the weekend.

Plenty of the finalized things are dropping in today, with us soon having all of the assets functional in-game.

As for what I did today, mostly playtesting our game and testing out an additional feature. This feature allows the player to survive one fatal hit, as the firestarter enemy is too oppresive when it comes to attacking the player at low health. This gives the player a very small window of invincibility for them to hack away at enemies to regain lost health.

Us designers also tried out the other groups game to get a feel for what they have accomplished in this amount of time.

Other than that, not much more has happened. The pressure is now higher than ever and next week is sure to be filled with issues involving new assets being implemented.

Today was once again mostly spent on playtesting and discussing the overall balance of the game.

All of us designers did five additional testruns through the game to get some data. The data we gathered was also very clear about how our firestarter enemy is unfair and too powerful, being the cause of more than fifty percent of the overall deaths.

Other than that, we have finally gotten all of the sounds to an acceptable state, only needing to be implemented and mixed.

Things are definitely slowing down, but content to the game is flowing in and being tested by us designers.

Another day, another set of struggles to handle.

The day started off fairly calm with us designers talking with the sound designers before going back to playtesting. Most of the sounds we were given today got greenlit and the few that didn’t were getting close. The elevator sounds we got today was more akin to a futuristic elevator rather than an old, raggedy one.
The disolve sound for when an enemy is killed is also getting a lot closer to what we want, after giving them a good reference.

But just before I went to lunch, a recent push to the repository had broken the game. It took the programmers, an artist and a fellow designer with the help from a teacher to fix the problem. Even then the process took a couple of hours, during which us designers tested a previous version of the game.
Turns out one of the values was incorrect when I playtested yesterday in order to get some data, rendering the data invalid. Due to this I spent my morning redoing the tests and writing down the data I got after clearing five runs of the game. Compared to the data I got yesterday, the single value really did a hit on my performance.

After the issue was finally resolved, we finished the day off with testing out the newest build to check if anything was broken or not.

That about wraps up todays work and the end of the project is slowly approaching.

Today felt mostly like more of the same yet again, except our afternoon was spent on discussing the various variables we tested as per the lead designers request.

These values mostly consisted of how powerful we want the enemies to be. There were palnty of values that we just kept the same as last time we agreed upon values, as they still felt fair. Though we have noticed that the game feels very difficult on the higher floors compared to the lower ones. But we have yet to get all animations into the game as well as all of the enemy variants, meaning we don’t fully know how difficult it will be.

As for my own testing, I tried doubling the players health and the enemies damage output. I did this change to help improve one of our enemy variant’s effect on the enemies. This variant is the Firestarter and explodes upon contact with the player, as well as damaging nearby enemies.
The reason for me changing the player health and enemy damage because of the Firestarter is to allow it’s damage to be high enough to impact the enemies whilst still being able to effectively damage the enemies.

But that is about it for today and I eagerly await for what tomorrow will bring.

Today we finally got some animations into the game, meaning we can finally start testing how attacks feel and such. So far it is only the basic grunt that has animations, but the rest is soon to come.

Other than that, today has mostly consisted of further discussions regarding new sounds that the sound team has developed and sent us for feedback. This took place for the majority of the morning.
We got a few new sounds that sounded good and got admitted, whilst some still need some additional tuning. The only sound we didn’t admit was the elevator sounds of the doors opening and closing. This was due to them sounding too old compared to our more futuristic esthetic.

During the afternoon we did some further playtesting and was given a list of things to test by our lead designer. This list featured things like healthgain, enemy variables as well as the new augment etc.
Most of my testing revolved around the new augment to get a feel for it.

Unfortunately us Designers are starting to see the need for working overtime if we hope to finish this project in time. We Designers will also start to try to work overtime to help make the other more willing to follow along, especially since it’s the artist work that needs the most additional time to finish.