Senior Production

Post XI

The title says the bulk of what this post will cover. I will also briefly talk about some of the small updates I’ve made in my minimal time to work on the project since last week. Oh and let’s not forgot where my team is in terms of stages and the upcoming presentation day (less than a week away…).

This week has been a bit hectic on my end. My networking project which was turned in last Thursday ate up the first half of my week with two days in a row of near sleepless nights. Adding on top of that the fact that my Friday has work until dinner, it meant little time to work on things. I did, however, manage to get a few small quality of life improvements to the game. The first of which was toggling the popups. Our game has been using somewhat temporary UI popups to help the player understand what they have to do while playing the game. I’ve shown them in many posts previous to this and while they are incredibly helpful, they are also incredibly immersion breaking. I personally didn’t want to get rid of them and after some talking, we decided to keep them as a “tutorial” style feature, kind of like training wheels. The player will be able to turn them on/off at will and it is there if they need it.

The second part of these changes was the addition of a way to tell if something can be interacted with. Since our previous method involved the UI popups, we needed something more ingrained into the world. Our final decision was an outline when you could interact with objects, similar to what a lot of other games like Left 4 Dead and Evolve used to make it easy to spot. You can see this in action below.

The Flare Box

The Gate

Now that I’ve covered all I was able to do, lets talk about MIGS. I wasn’t originally planning on attending the conference, but about 2 1/2 weeks ago i received a surprising email. I had applied for a free pass to MIGS back in September through their website. They were going to give a free pass to a select few “job seekers” and I ended up being one of the selected few. This meant a huge shift in my plans and was quite a nightmare scheduling wise since I effectively had 2 weeks to plan my trip. I left Saturday, and arrived Tuesday in time to go to 2 out of 3 of my classes. Without access to a powerful enough computer or two monitors, my resources were limited. Not to mention the entire point of the trip was to spend all day at MIGS trying to get a job and to go to sessions. Sunday was incredibly exhausting with several hours of talking to recruiters and developers about job opportunities and later that night following up with every one as well as applying to what felt like a million job positions at those companies. Monday was less crazy since I had talked to most of the companies with positions I was interested in and I had a great opportunity to attend a session on profiling and optimizing UE4 projects. This was probably my favorite part of MIGS (not that I didn’t enjoy all the conversations I had Sunday!).

What does MIGS have to do with my senior team? Well I think that I learned a lot going to the conference, even excluding the talk about UE4. I was able to ask questions to some of the developers about some of the things they did to tackle similar problems in their games that I’ve had in the past. I also went to that UE4 talk which was 3 hours of pure information and I learned an enormous amount of very applicable information. It finally taught and showed me what I can do to improve the performance in our game and what common pitfalls to avoid while developing it. What helped make this even more useful was the fact that at this point, I feel very comfortable in UE4.

Last week we challenged the Proof of Concept Stage and passed into Vertical Slice. That was also the time we learned we would have to challenge Vertical Slice to be guaranteed a spot to present this coming Monday. This was contrary to what we had previously heard from other professors and students and has my team slightly concerned. That being said, we can still present with permission and it is our intention to ask for it. This was also a sudden change in plans for us and due to the difficulties of attempting to get all the required materials for a challenge by tomorrow (which was impossible), we’ve decided to continue focusing our efforts towards the presentation in the hopes we get to actually present our game. This is all I have for you this week, tune in next week for what will likely be an update on where our game is for the presentation.

TL;DR:

• UI popups are now toggleable
• Interactable objects now have a highlight (like Left 4 Dead)
• I went to MIGS and couldn’t do much homework
• I learned a lot about UE4 at MIGS
• We are petitioning to present