Week 4 – Alpha
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Hello again! This week was crazy stressful, we had our alpha deadline on Thursday and there was so much to be done before that. On both Tuesday and Wednesday we worked from 10 am until midnight. For the alpha we wanted a new and bigger level than the level we had for last weeks playtesting. So the first thing I did was to start working on a new level. At first it was difficult and I couldn’t get started on the level layout. Luckily one of my programmers helped me a little bit with the first draft of the layout. After I had the first version of the level I things really picked up for me. I started redoing some of the corridors, broke down the really long ones and created several shorter corridors with more turns and rooms in between them. At this time it was easier to see what could and what could not work. After I was finished with the layout I started mapping out the different routes that the player could guide the prisoners through to the exit room. After drawing up the routes from the prisoner rooms to the exit room I, together with one of our artists started working on different guard patrol routes. When all the guards and prisoners had been placed I started working on the monitors, what we use to guide our prisoners. I started by placing out one monitor in each room, then in the corridors outside the rooms. After that I just filled in the empty spots. On the day before the alpha I was working on implementing everything into the scene. I made sure all the prefabs were updated every time they had been changed. When I was done with the scene, one of my artists took over and started adding the necessary visual effects such as camera effects, the correct shaders, etc. After a while there was not much I could do as I was waiting for the coders to finish their work and until the artists had added their artistic touch to the entire scene, so I took that time to help the coders when they needed it. Thursday, the dreaded alpha day. We had almost everything, we just needed the last part from our AI coder. This is when things fell apart. Bugs after bugs after bugs. They all decided to show their faced when there was only a few hours left until the alpha. We spent those last hours, last minutes on trying to debug and solve the bugs. But for each we solved two more showed up. In the end we did not have a playable alpha. It was very unfortunate, but the alpha testers understood and still did their best to give us feedback on what they could see and from what we explained. In the end we still received good feedback and have now a bunch of new and different ideas to discuss. I now end this crazy week with a Sunday of doing absolutely nothing. Until next week! Ara  |