#Week 12
The one where I reached the finish line (almost)
In Engine
I mostly focused on the remaining in-engine tasks this week. I made all puzzles look a little nicer with the assets I found on the marketplace, however I struggled with the lighting in the scenes. Since the story is at nighttime there is not much light in the scenes which makes navigating through them a little difficult. I tried to use lights to direct the player through the puzzles.
There was only one puzzle left to make functional so I decided to use the same mechanics as in the first puzzle but with more steps. I found this would be easier for the player to adapt to and solve the puzzle than introducing more mechanics.
I also implemented more UI elements such as hints that pop up when a player is close to an item they have to interact with. Before each puzzle I added a little bit of the story element and explained the controls. Since all the game play is made to work with controllers I also tried to make the UI work with controllers, however since I created the main menu in one widget it proved itself a little difficult and due to the lack of time I did not want to prioritize this task over more important things to make the game fully functional - which is why the main menu only works with the mouse but all other UI elements work with the controllers as I created separate widgets for everything else.
With the stuck mechanism mini game I implemented a bar that fills up as the player presses the buttons to give some visual feedback to them. The bars are also color coded to the respective button they have to press. Once they complete this mini game successfully I also made the bar that is stuck in the mechanism fall on the floor.
Board Game
Once the board game was finished and all puzzles functional I had another play test which I recorded so that I could show the whole game functioning.
The whole play session lasted for little over an hour but I cut scenes and reduced the video to 12 minutes. I also tried to make the video as easy as possible to follow.
I also wrote the rule sheets this week to put them in the game box for my hand in. I tried to simplify this as much as possible to make them easy to follow.
Thank you :)
Thank you for reading my blog. This will be my last post as I will hand in my project after this. But before I leave you with this I wanted to thank:
Max, Catia, Sam and Vi - for play testing;
Sam - for painting the map tiles for me;
Jamie Smith- for being my supervisor and giving me great feedback to work on every week;
Graham Stewart - for being my second mentor for this and helping me produce the board game;
Ben Pool - for sacrificing his blood while helping me cutting out some board game pieces
Beth Reed - for being my living rubber duck
