Chicken Scramble - Sprint 4

 For this sprint, the goal was to get a new level in. We have it in there, and you can play through it, but obviously it’s still unfinished. I spent the entire night before sprint review thinking that we needed to get it done right now, so I ended up rushing the programmer to fix a bug with the mazekeeper transitioning to the next level (which he did but he ended up forgetting to do some of his own homework that was due that day). I feel really bad about rushing him, but the act of putting together a new build actually turned out to be a good idea. When I tested the build out on the high performance computers in the library, the frame rate was absolutely terrible. It’s a good thing I saw this problem now and not later when we actually do need the build out.

Footage of the current build.

    At the moment, I’m not exactly sure what is causing the bad frame rate. In our game, we’re putting all the levels in one main scene so that we don’t have to mess with scene transitions when we want to switch to a new level. Just teleport the locations of the player and mazekeeper! At first, I thought it was the new level in the scene bogging down the performance, so I quickly cobbled together some spaghetti code to disable the currently unused level. That didn’t seem to do anything. Our modeler did mention that he’s made games with way more models and higher poly counts, and those did not have performance issues. I did a quick search on Google and people suggested turning off VSync, which also did not work. I’ll need to look at the Unity Profiler later as soon as I can.

Other than that, the main dev work I did in this sprint was getting the levels to transition correctly. The way we’re doing it is just teleporting the locations of the mazekeeper and the player. The levels also enable and disable depending on which level the player is currently on. I ended up rushing this part near the end of the sprint, but in the future I can make it better very easily. Creating the transitions was a little more difficult than expected because I thought I could use scriptable objects to hold all the info about the levels, but they won’t work with scene objects, so they were largely useless. Moving the player was very easy, but the mazekeeper kept getting stuck to the first level’s NavMesh when I tried to teleport it to the new one, so I had to ask a programmer to fix it as quickly as possible.


More Item Sprites


    I also improved the menus a bit and did some more art. The back buttons on every menu use the same back function, except for the victory screen to level select transition. The way I have it set up, the game manager only keeps track of the current menu open and the previous menu opened. Each time a menu is opened, the manager takes note of it and takes note of the previous menu opened. The options menu is accessible from the level select menu, which is accessed by the victory screen when you finish a level. You can click the level select menu button in the victory screen to open the menu, and go back, it’ll work. But if you access the options menu and go back to the level select menu, the back button in the level select menu won’t go back to the victory screen, because the previous menu recorded in the game manager is the level select menu.

Anyways, I’m quite proud of the work that the team did this sprint. The team did a lot and worked really hard!

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