Project Reflection

Now that the project is over I thought I'd give a brief reflection over my thoughts on how my first client project went. It was a great project for me and the rest of my team as well as a vital learning experience. We were able to receive the requirements from the client and proceeded to do our best to fulfill them. The communication started out great in the first couple of weeks. We had game industry professionals as our client and they were helping us out with this project on their spare time. That being said, it was hard for our clients to give this project and our group the constant attention. We received great feedback at times and it was what made our project that much better. Towards the end of the project phase we ended up losing that connection for unclear reasons. Although this was unforeseen, our group was still able to stay together and continue our project. I hope this client project can serve as a learning experience for each of the team members and have us better prepared for the events that can unfold in the real world. Although we did not get the full requirements done, we got a nice acceptable build that was ready to go and show off at our presentation.

Beta Phase Wrap Up

So this week was the ultimate crunch time as we were pulling out all the stops to get a nice working build ready to go for the beta presentation. There was multiple parts of the projects that various members had so integration was very difficult to do properly.
As my final task for the build, I was working on setting the camera matinees for each of the levels as I mentioned in my last post. There were so many problems arising with this matter. Even though our level designer set up the matinee correctly as to what I needed, the camera for some reason was following a slightly off path which resulted in showing too much of the level or not ending in the correct position that I needed it to.
After many trials and tribulations my final attempt to solve this for the beta build was to hard code the position at the end of the matinee cycle. Although this worked for most levels, a few of them still bugged out on me. It wasn't too bad of a bug for the build, so it sufficed.
Once the matinees were done I sent them over for integration and the final pieces of the puzzle were put together.

Level Camera Matinee Revisited

Over the week I have looked into what possible steps can be taken to address our level camera matinee sequence issue.

The problem: Level camera matinee plays every time the level is loaded or restarted which turned out to be a nuisance when it was play tested.

Intended solution: Establish a procedure to check if a level is being loaded the first time or not. If it is then play the level camera matinee. If the level is restarted or is being loaded a second time, then skip the level camera matinee.

I did some research in regards to see if I can find a set up that will work with what I need to accomplish. I found a nice Kismet sequence set up that can trigger our matinee through an UnrealScript function. You can see below to accomplish this I needed to use a Console Event that triggers the matinee and also sets a boolean variable to true/false via the Console Command to see the if the matinee is playing.

Kismet Sequence for Level Camera

What I need however is a set up in the level scripts to have a boolean variable to check if the level has been loaded previously or not. I'll need to collaborate with a fellow programmer who set up the level scripts to see if he can set this up for me. Once he does, I can begin implementation of this solution.

QA Testing

This week we spent playtesting the other senior projects. This was a good opportunity to see what external testers thought of the game and what bugs we missed. Our build consisted of about 16 levels and some were not completely playable. We knew of most of the bugs that were present in the build, so it was rare to find a bug that one of the testers reported which we were oblivious to.
We did receive feedback on the user interface as well which mainly consisted of making the buttons larger since on the ipod they are all a bit small to touch the intended button.
We have are starting up week 6 and are in a critical part in development. We should have most of the game developed, but we are not near that point at all yet. We are behind in development and we really need to make a push and start pushing things out soon. We've been behind with the object replacement for the levels and the object interactions have been slow to implement as well. A lot of this work had members relying on other other member's work and this has really taken a toll on the overall project. We'll see how much we can finish up in the coming week.