Week 10 : Taping The Box.

We had our class held at 8 in class we were briefed about all that's need to be submitted. After class we were working on playtesting our game. We encountered a few but severe game breaking bugs. Like one if them was very serious, it was that the level generator seam to get broken on one of the PC of the developer. We sat with the bug for almost 7 hours to solve the issue. but we were not able to track the issue as the program appeared to be flawless upon multiple analysis. Later I felt like the reason could be that the PC is fast and the resetting system is unable to fully reset within a span of 5 frames which was provided at the time. So we decided to give it a resetting delay of about .3 seconds. Then we tested it for about an hour or so to see if it breaks again and found that our new fix seam to solve the issue. Thou solved we were not fully satisfied with our fix as even now we are not fully sure of what went wrong.

Then I noticed a bug with the server which I made. The issue was that the player socket was not terminated when any case of crash occurred in any of the clients the server doesn't register a disconnection and the room keeps on existing in the server and causes minor issues while connecting and potentially cause major issues down the line while production. So I sat with the server to track the issue and managed to come up with a solution the solution is that when ever the client joins the client send or in our case Pings to notify that the player is in connection with the server and if the server stops getting pings the player for more than 10s the server is asked to disconnect the socket and terminate the connection from the room. Which was a very smart suggestion suggested by my friend Anikith. Then later down the line. I worked on and improved the UI and panels of our game mainly menu and controls. the most important aspect in all is the consistency of style. what ever happens the consistency in colors, sizes, fonts, spacings, priorities must never be changed or tampered with if you wish of a quality of well polished look for your virtual product. The one thing that I really enjoyed making was a timer shadier for the game which is supposed to signify the remaining game time to the player. The Idea was to have something that shows the player and remarks an urgency like say to show the building on fire and such. Then I sat and came up with a dissolve UI shader which was ok. but i wanted something more, more expressive and fancy. the I decided to add a glowing outline in white which solved the issue and set it where I wanted.

Transferable Skills

Flexibility/Adaptability : I was asked by my team lead to make the timer more representative of the players condition which is the lack of time or impending doom of being locked up for ever within the hotel. We had a bit of an argument as I don't want to ad some sort of simpleton looking icon like a clock or time piece which up to me looks stupid. But considering the design point of view explained by the team lead I changed it and came up with the burning hotel look.

Problem Solving Skills : I tested out a couple of way of time and emergency representation till I got satisfied with the dissolving hotel idea. The Shader had a couple of visual bugs such as depth issue for UI rendering. Through some research i was able to fix the issue.

References

DISSOLVE using Unity Shader Graph. (2018, June 10). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taMp1g1pBeE

R. (2020, May 3). Game Dev Bits - EP02 - Directional dissolve in unity [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSF-A4D2vuI&feature=youtu.be

Shader - Dissolve Effect - [Tutorial][C#]. (2017, July 11). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc2IUveUiZI