Xodius Studios Blog #13 - A Little Shine to Make It Prime! - By Justin Palmer

 

 

 

 

Xodius Studios Blog #13

A Little Shine to Make it Prime!

Author:Justin Palmer
Published: 05/25/23 21:00

The Problem:

    The main problem this week was getting the game ready for a demo release.  There were a lot of minor and major bugs that still needed fixed.  Finding and fixing bugs are essential to a well working game that can make the player feel more involved and 'in the zone', so to speak.  If a player doesn't enjoy the game, they will not talk about it to their friends, and most likely won't pay for any add-ons that may be made further down the road.  Polishing is just as important as getting the game to function!  Some of the bugs we found after playing multiple playthrough were: Shopkeeper not working with controller, some corner pillars having gaps from the floor and needing lowered, enemies weren't dying when using the bow and arrow, tutorial popups all were doubled on accident, and the text would stack on each other when popup occurred.

 




The Solution:

    The best solution to play the game as a normal player would.  Start at the beginning and do a full QA (Quality Assurance) on the game as a Game Tester.  Our procedure was to have me play through the level and have Michael write down any bugs I found along the way.  When I died or finished the level we would go in and try to fix the bugs we found and run another playthrough.  

Here are a few fixes to the bugs we found during these runs:

Shopkeeper: Go through the code and add 'isFocusable' on each button you want the controller to access. Put a 'SetFocus' node with a target of which button you want the controller to default on. IMPORTANT NOTE: SetFocus can NOT be called without a small delay after the widget is created.  Otherwise the 'focus' can't see the widget.  A 0.2 second delay was sufficient and took at least 4 hours of research to find the solution!

Corner Pillars: Translate the object lower to better fit the geometry of the level.

Enemy Deaths: We rewrote the AI multiple times during Capstone and kept changing how the damage was passed around between the player and the enemies.  We had 3 different locations between the player and enemies that were passing the damage to the enemy and only one was doing the 'true' damage correctly.  Lots of breakpoints helped us find all the issues and remove the unneeded code.

Tutorial Popups: By constantly pushing and pulling the Tutorial Popups got 'double-stacked'.  An easy search for the 'tutorial popups' in the 'World Outliner' gave all the popups and a simple right-click -> delete allowed the removal of each duplicate.

Typewriter Widget Text: To fix the messages displayed on screen we had to use 'Get All Widgets of Class' -> 'TypeWriter Widget' and choose 'Remove From Parent'.  This would close all currently typing messages, and allow the new text to be displayed using a 'Typewriter Widget'




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