We’re here. We reached it. The end. Yup, this is the end. No more deadlines, perhaps a few last bugfixes if anything turns up - after all, it is difficult to get each and every edgecase by ourselves, even if we try our hardest. But this game has everything it needs now.
Let’s start with what happened last week.

Feedback, feedback, MORE FEEDBACK

We are talking about player feedback. You know, things like sounds, effects, animations. Stuff like that. Really small things, often, that bring really big changes. For example, it’s hard to miss the bombs now: they have a minecraft-creeperlike tsssssss sound when they spawn. There are some other objects that got some more sound, or where the sound has been changed.
The biggest change sound-wise might be the scientist. He’s talking now. With short sentences, he will alert the player of enemies at the camp, or when he is ready to give an upgrade.
Another thing that happened, and that brought a good way of highlighting all the pickups and interactables, is an outline. The outline separates the gameplay elements from the general environment, something that had been missing until now and made it at times hard to see what the player could do.

Testing the build

While adding in the last of sounds and effects, we of course also did a lot of bugfixing and tweaking - you won’t get swamped with enemies anymore, for example, and the oasis actually heals a decent amount now. So after quite some hours of playtesting in the editor, we made a build, and playtested that one. Guess what? One of the functions we used, started doing a slightly different thing, making the research speed impossibly slow. After fixing that, and even more playtesting, we are where we are now - writing a devlog because our game is finished.

A 12-week conclusion

What can we say? It was our first game together, and for many of us, the first actual game overall - we might all be students following either game development or game graphics, we usually do not get the chance to work with each other. On top of that, this game was larger than any other game-ish project we made before.
The fact that this was the first time game dev students could work together with art students in one project did provide some challenge. After all, the art students did not always know exactly what the programmers would need, and the programmers did not always know what was going on with a certain effect or mesh that was or wasn’t spawning in with code. Luckily we had good communication in our group, and everyone was always prepared to help someone out, or to change a few things in order to fix something.
As for the project itself, there were two main challenges, mostly for our programmers: c++ in Unreal and the planet.
The planet was, once it was figured out, something that could be over and done with. No need to change a working system of which you know how it works. However, UE is something else. It’s big, it’s complex, and it has too many things that can go wrong if you do not have the necessary knowledge. We ran into quite some issues because we used something in the “wrong” way, without knowing it. This stayed a challenge until the very end, having to solve new trouble as we went.
All in all, we are very happy with how the game turned out, and with how the group has functioned.

And of course, thank you, readers and gamers, for reading this log and playing our little game. As this is our very first game, every download and every view is extra thrilling!