Week 9 - More Polish

This was the second week of polish. This time I worked on adding sounds, optimizing the game and performing several small changes.

For the sounds I went to https://opengameart.org/  and https://www.kenney.nl/assets as these have a good selection of free assets. I focused on sounds related to gameplay actions first like walking, grabbing objects or using objects. Afterwards I searched for background music that contrasted with the visuals to create a more comedic feeling. Once this was done I searched for a theme for the main menu and a jingle for the victory screen.

Once this was done I started investigating how I could improve the performance of the game. I knew that the issues were related to the lights because before any code was made my computer already had issues working with scenes with multiple objects and some light sources. After investigating for some time I learned how to lower the resources consumed by the lights. After tinkering with the different aspects available I found settings that allow the game to look good while being playable. In the future I want to learn more about this as I don’t think most indie games can make full use of the beautiful yet costly graphics of UE5.

Lastly I worked on several small changes and fixes that were necessary to make the game feel like a real game and not a prototype. A few examples are removing the visible colliders from the game, replacing the last textures of the objects that were still using the prototype ones, giving different textures to the enemies to at least try to make them feel like different people. Though none of these changes was particularly difficult, some required a lot of care to look good and thus took a lot of time.

Next week I will work on the final polish for the game. I want to have a build for people to play to be able to implement some real user feedback back into the game.