This week, I have sought to relax and provide some insight of the assets that I have created to make sure they are possible to be implemented into the game. Max had told me and the rest of the 3D Artists to upload the textures to Teams so that he can download them and apply them in Unity along with the assets. I have followed up with his request and I have created a folder specifically for them, with each asset and their textures within them. Hopefully, Kameron and Ben should be ready to upload their creations granted they haven’t been cut from the final game already.
Playtesting the game
Since my job as a 3D Artist is basically over at this point, I couldn’t just do nothing until the game’s release as I wanted to set myself a challenge to play what we currently have on itch.io and perform any actions that would result in glitches and major issues occurring so I could report back to Max for fixing. There are two versions of the game on the platform – the early alpha build and the finished product. It is vital to create the code and character movement and fine-tune them to be satisfactory to both the developers and the players before expanding on the game world. (Game Maker’s Toolkit, 2015).
Early Alpha
Upon playing the early alpha prototype of the game, I found some notable and major bugs occurring within the game on multiple playthroughs. For starters, the game essentially becomes unplayable after the flashlight dies, leaving you in a pitch black environment with nothing to guide your way. Another issue that I came across is that depending on the type of player, the camera sensitivity can cause some issues. There could’ve been an option to scale the camera sensitivity to the player’s liking, but this is just a minor issue.
Updated Build
When Max uploaded the game onto Itch.io, I wanted to be the first to playtest it and see if my assets were in there along with everything else. I booted up the game and extracted the files to play it, since it was on a zip file and thus had to be downloaded in order to play. I did however ask him if the smoothness of the game was still feasible as an HTML, but I checked to see that Max doesn’t have the file anymore, which is baffling to me. Here is the Teams conversation I had with him regarding this method.
Apart from that, the game seems to be running smoothly and to my surprise, found all four of my developed assets in the game. This build is not without its bugs though, as the darkness still is strong after the flashlight dies out, and with the lack of a menu to replay the level, the game feels off. Another slight issue I had found while playing the game is that the there is a random mesh light showing me where the key is regardless if I have the flashlight on or not. This could be a game mechanic Max had added, I’m not too sure.
As I looked around the spawn room, I could notice the walls flickering whenever I make a turn, which is off-putting and makes the game look kind of buggy.
Despite this however, the light packs seem to have an updated look as it is now a box with handles and buttons to replenish the batteries in the flashlight,
As I wandered in further, I was surprised to see skeleton assets laying on the hospital beds. I’m assuming one of the other 3D Artists created this and posted it on Teams, or it could’ve been Max himself, who knows.
There might be some other stuff that I have missed during my playtest session, as the other team members could have found something else that they can report back to Max.
Game Link
Here is the link to the finished game on Itch.io
Leave a Reply