Running towards the final build! Learning from Beta feedback, we are wrapping the mechanism and making improvements to level design and UI. Additional sound effects are prepared for different tasks in the game.
Programming ⌨️
Network stability
This week was a lot of networking and server stability work. We transitioned from the outdated UNet transport protocol to the newer UTP which helped with getting clearer error messages particularly when connecting to addresses which had no server listening.
Art 🖍
UI
This week, we worked on updating the UI for the main menu and overhauling the UI for the game. The design mockups below are the intended designs for the UI. If time permits, I’ll look into adding a tweening library and animating some of the parasite figures to be more playful.
Level: Lighting
This week, we light up the whole level and use color and spot light to emphasize the difference of rooms and highlight task related objects.
This adjustment in lighting adds more effect of shadows and aims to help the players to navigate though the level.
Audio 🎹
This week much of the focus was on polishing existing mechanics and working on UI. To that end the main task for audio was to create unique sounds for each of the tasks that the human needs to complete in order to win the game. These, along with additional UI sounds, are all just simple one shots that can be played so creation and implementation is fairly simple.
The more elusive goal of this week is to work on balancing our current audio and debugging any sound issues that may occur. The audio balancing is done using the real-time mastering feature of FMOD, where each sound event can be edited in the FMOD editor while unity is running the build. This allows sounds to be adjusted in real time while playing, making quick fixes to the audio balance very easy.