One more week - See you Wednesday!

So there’s just one week left before our capstone ends. At that point, we will then be presenting our game at the University of Baltimore campus alongside the other capstone projects. But before that, we presented our game at Student Research Day.

During that time, I got a whole bunch of useful comments, and discovered a whole slew of bugs, which I promptly dealt with during the event. It proved to be a very helpful experience just for the bugs and feedback alone!

At this point, I’m wrapping things up on all fronts - fixing the last bugs, polishing various details, adding last-minute details, and prepping everything for lightmapping. On the latter front, I’ve discovered that you can omit certain objects from casting and/or receiving shadows, and even omit them from being lightmapped altogether. I have since used this knowledge to great effect, although the lightmapping will surely still take a while. A few more tweaks, and I should be ready to lightmap everything.

Now before I present the list of changes, I’ll just give the heads up that my last post (for the time being) will come on Wednesday instead of the usual Sunday (or so). Development will end then, so I’ll present my last changes a little later than usual.

But now, here’s the new list of changes:

Technical

+Fixed a glitch where a player couldn’t get a Game Over more than once.

+Updated the PlayerStats prefab to have an AudioSource.

+Updated the PlayerStats prefab with an AudioAdjuster component

+Created a system to enable/disable MeshRenderers based on distance from the player. Added these to Generic NPCs.

Player

+Increased the player’s acceleration factor to 7 (up from 6), and Hard Reverse factor to 14 (up from 12).

+Increased the thickness of the player’s axle collider to reduce clipping possibilities.

UI

+Created a new UI Message function that configures message text size.

Tutorial

+Updated the tutorial script to be able to inform other scripts if the tutorial is currently marked to be skipped or not.

Mall

+Added an Out of Order sign to a Restaurant bathroom door.

+Created a resizable parking lot line prefab, which will also not be affected by lightmapping.

+Set the tillable floor object throughout the mall to not cast shadows to vastly improve lightmapping performance.

+Reduced the minimum extend wheels requirement of the tutorial to 1.35f Unity Units (down from 1.5f)

+Removed skewed colliders for the Toy Store doors to stop the player from colliding through them.

+Added a new parking lot ramp with proper scaling, and put it in the parking lot.

+Added more parking lot lines, which wraps up the parking lots.

+Added some more boxes and Coming Soon posters to one of the generic store entrances.

+Added in 3 missing Digital Directory maps.

-Disabled the Mall whiteout effect outside of the Mall entrance, giving the player a clear view of the Mall’s parking lot.

-Reduced the opacity of the Mall entrance sliding doors to 162 (down from 192).

Park

+Smoothed out the southern paths to reduce the player turning on the slopes.

+Adjusted the positions of bushes throughout the park for easier navigation around them.

Level Selection

+Updated the general information of each level to identify how many items the player needs to collect.

+Added some descriptive text for the two levels (no impact on gameplay - just some simple lore)

+Added a poster made by Victoria to the right side of the Level Selection screen.

+Made the Park locked by default again.

+Added a checkbox for the tutorial to be skipped, and made functionality to make the choice remembered between scenes.

NPC

+Added some #if statements to the AIMovement script to control debug messages.

+Added 6 new textures for the Generic NPCs

+Created the start of a random material assigner for generic NPCs.

+Created a script to select between a set of materials on any object. Applied this to the Generic NPCs (both sitting and standing).

+Created several new material objects for Generic NPCs, and named them consistently.

+Added some new voice clips for Conspiracy Theorists for Theorist Ambushes in the park.

+Fixed a bug where a Theorist Boss calling for backup caused Conspiracy Theorist to move towards a target even when tripped.

+If a Conspiracy Theorist is already chasing the player, they will ignore Theorist Boss calls.