Final Additions to scenes
In some of the scenes we went through to try and adjust certain areas of dialogue and how things are prompted to the player which included all of us adding some more highlights and even some subtitles to make sure that the player can follow the dialogue more easily during the narrative.
Technical Issues with the Scene changer
We had been working on this project mostly in unity for the past couple of months and experiences minimal technical glitches and problems. However we finally wanted to attempt a build of the whole project which now looking back we wish we had tried sooner because we found that there was a serious problem in the opening scene.
There is a collider in place in the bathroom doorway that when the player enters and walks through is suppose to set active more objects and set active false the collider the user walks through which worked perfectly in unity but in the build it crashed everytime. The build took quite a long time to initiate and so we had not much time to fix this issue and so we had to resort to simply removing that particular collider in the scene which did seem to work.
File Size Issues
Another issue we found with working seperately, merging files and using so many different assets was that the project became very large and over time it grew from 8gb, to 15gb, to 25gb and eventually to 35gb plus which meant that some of the loads times in between scenes could take up to a minute at times and so we had to go through a lot of the scenes and find areas where we could reduce these loads times as much as we possible could.
To resolve some of these issues we went through to bake the lighting and tried to remove some of the overall larger effects because in the 2020s scene it was 2gb of lighting which was insane to us!
We also attempted to lock the frame rate and reduce the overall draw distance to help with the load times on the levels
Changing Colliders in the 1990s and future scene
One of the main issues that we found when building the file as explained earlier was of course the collidrs and so we found that perhaps the set active false of the collider is creating an issue and so we had to go through all of the scripts and create an on trigger exit that would deactivate these instead. This however led to an even further issue where we found that we had written the word exit in upper case which also had a strong effect on the scripts which was annoying but we were able to go through the whole project to try and resolve this.
Problems with certain scenes in the build folder
In the build folder after multiple attempts and changes we were able to have mostly all of the scenes working such as the future and 2020s scene but we had problems where the 1980s and 1990s scene would crash on load. After some code changes and removing certain colliders we were able to restore the 1980s scene so that it would work with the transition but the 1990s scene was still crashing and unfortanately we were running out of time before deadline to try and resolve this issue and had to resort to showing the full level in the recording but of course having the risk that it would crash on that scene in the final build verison of the experience.
Final Submission
We were able to overall successfully get the file size down to a zipped folder of 1.8gb which was good for the moodle submission while also collating all of the other documents including the critical discussion, scripts, data, GDD and many other elements.
Conclusion
Overall i must say that i am very happy with how the whole experience came together that we were able to mostly create and make all our ideas from the original script and concept we had. We were able to create quite a large and hopefully interseting project for the players and the research iterations that we conducted were very helpful and also very interesting to discuss overall. As a group project it was also very enjoyable and collaborative so i feel we had all worked very well together considering the scope and time we spent on this project.