Sanctum Infernum Week 7

Weekly Sprint

As a continuation from last weeks sprint a new task was created onto the Jira for my task for this weeks sprint. I continued to work on populating the levels with the remaining assets that I had and where waiting for which where primarily from Antonio some of these where shelf's and daggers, and though there was still a few that needed to be put onto the unity by him I was mostly done at this point. After I had finished I made sure to go back a cleanup what may be floating or clipping.

Now during the week I was notified by Aliyah that some of my objects where still floating. Heading back into the scene I found that something had made everything float, clip or was duplicated, so at some point somebody must have accidentally did this. Luckily for me it isn't to hard to fix as what I did was spend the time putting all the objects back into place, Separate clipped objects and delete the duped ones. At the end of this week I felt there are still areas of improvement for myself specifically with the time I spend on my work. I am able to get my tasks and work done to an appropriate degree but In many instances could spend even more time making said work better.

Optimization

Though the goal of this weeks sprint was to focused on having a build something that I took note of was how bad the unity scene ran. The reason for the poor performance was from the assets, this is because of the amount of polys many of the assets had. The barrel itself had around 11 thousand tris and with near 400 of them plus with the other assets cause the dramatic performance drop. Fixing this means getting in touch with the artists so that it can get sorted out. The problem is the assets need to be cleaned up it may mean replacing the old ones for the new ones though it would be pretty easy to do and would just take some time. It is important for game to run well especially for AAA titles as it is expected for them to have good optimization or you run the risk of people not playing the game or just not being able to which is important that the game we are creating runs to that standard.

There are some other ways of improving optimization. A texture atlas is a singular image that contains every texture and is used to help reduce the memory needed. Occlusion culling is also another way of improving optimization and it works by only drawing object that the player can see reducing the amount that is drawn in total. Most of these issues can only be solve by other areas such as programming but as a level designer making sure if I see any problems that could be cause optimization issues is to make other know of them.

Playtesting and Feedback

Something that we should be considering soon when we have a playable build is play testing. Having feedback will help us decide what needs to changed or improved. It is also important when it comes to improvement and learning as as a team we can learn from the mistakes that we have made and to avoid them in the future. And when I't comes to the people play testing we can get an understanding of what people enjoy and like and overall engagement.