Words of the Week: Frustration and Anticipation

I wasn't able to pursue the addition of sound effects in our game last week, as originally planned. This was due to our group as a whole deciding it'd be best to push that task further ahead—not until the entire level/game map was ready—in order to avoid task redundancy (i.e. minimize the number of changes that needed to be made by a single person). In spite of this, I still encountered a great deal of task redundancy, unfortunately.

Our Unity project is enormous in size and pushing it to Git has not been feasible since the size of the file surpassed the maximum space allocated to our repository quite early on in the development of our game. A large portion of our project involves game objects and assets rather than scripts. Currently, our method of making changes to the project between group members involves one group member working on the project at one time. Once they are done making their changes, they upload the project file to Dropbox or Google Drive and share the link with the rest of the team. This procedure can lead to issues if multiple team members decide to work on the project simultaneously, leading to multiple versions of the project with both missing key functionality or features. This method has also lead to multiple versions of the project existing on our computers and it's quite possible for one team member to accidentally upload or send a download link to an older version of the project. As a result of this, I've had to make the same changes to our game multiple times, which has been frustrating. 

One task I performed this week was the reintroduction of sounds to signify the pick up of keys or opening of doors in-game. I was able to synch sound with key pick up without difficulty but synching sound with door opening has been slightly challenging. In this iteration of the game, doors that are opened now rotate in position, rather than disappear entirely, as was the case in our game prototype. Attempting to introduce code for sound to the door opening script interferes with the functioning of the door, however. During testing, I discovered doors will either not open at all, or their original position will be off.  For the time being, I've decided to leave out sound for door opening, although I definitely intend to revisit this issue before Tuesday of next week as I believe the sound will introduce more realism to the game. 

Another key task I took on this week was the use of sound to build a mood and atmosphere within the game. This task certainly involved a level of creativity and I'll admit I had a hell lot of fun carrying this out. I decided to start the game off with soothing music that would lull the player into a false sense of calm, perhaps making them even think the game was of a different genre entirely (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WrongGenreSavvy ;) ). As the player proceeds onward, the game track transitions to something more suspenseful, yet still subtle. The sound continues to evolve as the player makes progress, and travels further along the map. Additionally, certain rooms or wards within the hospital have their own unique track. To achieve this, I employed the use of multiple audio sources referencing various tracks I was able to find in the Unity asset store. One point of concern was ensuring certain audio sources located farther away did not drown out audio sources nearby. This was challenging, and I discovered that fiddling around with the Priority levels and Volume rolloff of audio sources mitigated this effect. Although sound is now in place throughout the game, I'm still not entirely satisfied with the effects in place and would like to further hone and test as we continue development.    

I also attempted to reintroduce cursor effects (when the cursor changes based on the player's action) to the game this week but at this point in development this has been difficult to test due to there not yet being staff or patients for the player to attack. I do think a cursor change when the player opens a door is now unnecessary because doors are now opened via the 'F' key rather than clicking.   

At this point, I'd also like to add more models to the game to further enhance the look and feel of the hospital setting. These models may include furniture, wall hangings, signs, paintings, bathroom fixtures, etc. The use of audio reverb zones is also something that intrigues me and I look forward to potentially incorporating them into the game. Moreover, I'm excited to see the work Tanya will be doing to introduce interactive character dialog.