Week 8 - First Polish

For this week of development I aimed to start polishing the game. No more features will be added unless we found we are missing something important or found an area that could be greatly benefited and its implementation does not take a lot of time.

I started with the lighting. This was the aspect of the game I was less happy with. Also, this was the aspect of the game I knew the least about how to do it, especially in Unreal. For this reason I read and tinkered with the lights enough to be able to set them up in the level in a way that was visually pleasing and functional. I was not able to create the more moody environments I wanted to create but right now there were and still are many more aspects that need polish.

The next aspect I worked on was adding materials to all elements in the game that look like usable materials, not prototype ones. For this I didn’t use anything fancy, in part because the art direction of the game is simple and minimalist but also because the walls and ceiling are not the focus of the game. I did keep in mind that the walls must contrast with the furniture and pickable objects, the reason why I chose a withe color.  For the floor I did create a personalized texture for the tiles of the floor, nothing fancy but it does add that feeling of a traditional Colombian house.

After defining the colors of the walls I realized that the original color of the doors, which was also white, would not work. The doors are a focal point in all levels, these need to pop out, thus I made them a dark brown color and added extra details to make them call the player's attention whenever they enter their field of view.

Next I proceed to place all assets in the game. This process, though simple in theory, took a lot of time because of the attention to details I now need to have. At this point things not only need to be functional, they also need to look good and to achieve this I need to put extra effort as I don't have many assets nor are these particularly beautiful.

Now that all assets are replaced I proceeded to test the game to be sure all assets work and that I didn’t delete something I wasn’t supposed to delete. Though I didn’t find any game breaking bug nor did I delete anything core I did find some areas where I forgot to place certain blueprints like hiding spots. I also realized that the default collision meshes of the new assets were not the best and I needed to redo most of them.

The biggest issue that I found while performing the test was that players had no way of restarting the game once they lost. This is something I completely ignored as each time I would lose I just restart the game in the engine. It was one of those things that had become so normalized I didn’t realize it was missing until I looked hard into it. We won’t manage to fix this this week but we will have it ready for next week.

In general, this was a very taxing week for me. I felt like I had worked a lot though the game did not feel like it changed that much. I guess that is normal when you are doing the polish, as they said “the last 20% is 80% of the work”. I hope to be more efficient next week and have a playable build ready to give to people. I really need feedback from more people than just my partner.