Chicken Scramble - Sprint 5

    For this sprint, I mainly focused on getting the build to work and did some more work on the UI. To be honest, I feel like the team’s output in this sprint was not too great. Although, that was probably only because the last sprint’s output was really great. I usually remind the team to get at least one thing completed on the board so it doesn’t look like they spent 5 days doing nothing. Because there was a class that was canceled, people aren’t going to use that time to focus on the project, so I was unable to approve any work for nearly a week. I don’t really like to bug people on that since I know everyone’s extremely busy, but it was really concerning to me. We were able to make it up in the second week of the sprint, but consistency is important.
    In the last sprint blog, I talked about how the build was incredibly laggy, which would definitely have an impact on how a player would play the game. I looked at the Unity profiler, which told me that VSync was making it spike really hard. Weirdly enough, no matter what I did, the build kept lagging. I turned it off in the project, and it didn’t work. I messed with the 3D rendering settings of the graphics card and it still didn’t work. What I didn’t realize was that the build was lagging only on desktop computers, and it was because of the monitors. Usually, my teammates use powerful desktops with several monitors. When I first made the build, I tested it on the high-performance computer at the library, which resulted in lag. I asked a teammate to test it out to make sure and they also reported the lag issue on their desktop.
Lag in the build.

In class, we tested it on their work laptops, and the game actually ran perfectly fine, which was really surprising to me. I was able to fix the lag issue in this sprint by adding in an option for the player to play in windowed mode or fullscreen mode. I set the resolution to 1920x1080, because anything higher would make it lag. There’s still a bit of screen tearing, but it’s not going to mess with the game. Although, now that that ‘s solved, we now need to focus on improving the performance of the game because I’m starting to see some actual spikes from our code in the profiler.

I improved the level selecting transitions a bit more since the way I previously had it was really rudimentary. I was rushing it near the end of the previous sprint, so it was just some spaghetti code that said “if this level is inactive, set the other level inactive”. This time, I made it so that all the levels are in a list and the level that’s selected is activated and the rest are made inactive. So, we can add in new levels without needing to change the code. But at this point, we won’t really be able to add in anything new, which is really unfortunate.

The code I wrote for enabling levels.

Since the next sprint is the last sprint that we’ll have enough time to work on the game, I hope we are able to get everything in. We still have some textures to improve and we still need to add in a rating system so that players can see their previous times. I don’t think the team is going to slow down, but since we are nearing the end of the semester, work is going to ramp up from other classes and people need to spend time on those

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