Devlog 6: Last Fixes

This week the team has been continuing to working on fixing issues that arose during our testing session last week. Some of the issues have been quite easy for the team to find a solution for and fix, where others have proven more difficult to fix.  

Aim Alignment:

A key fix to the UI crosshair alignment came about by adjusting the hitLayers with the Inspector on the WeaponRaycast script. They hadn't been set, so the raycast wasn’t detecting any objects, making the laser and original raycast stretch out indefinitely without a vadlid endpoint. Which caused the crosshair to be misaligned since it had no reference point. By setting the hitlayers to Everything, the Raycast could detect surfaces, as long as they some form of collider, allowing the laser to stop at obstacles and the crosshair could correctly track the lasers endpoint.

We also experimented with using a laser pointer for the aim alignment instead of using the crosshair. This allows the players to see the exact path that the bullet will take, allowing the player to move so the laser is properly inline with the target. This was done within the WeaponRaycast script using a Line Renderer attached to the weapons FirePoint object, paired with a Raycast to figure out its endpoint. The laser in game is setup to be disabled on starting and can be toggled on/off with the T key. The UpdateLaserSight() function which was added to the WeaponRaycast script sets the lasers start position at the weapon and updates its end based on Raycast detection, and the laser stops at obstacles instead of passing through them. 

The fix ensured the laser, bullet path and crosshair all lined up properly, making aiming accurate and visually consistent. Players now have the option to use the laser by pressing T in game to potentially assist in targeting their shots.

Damage Pop Ups:

To make the damage pop ups in the game, we followed a tutorial called How to make DAMAGE POPUPS in 5 Minutes! - Unity. We decided to use damage pop ups instead of having constant health bars above the zombies. The reason we choose this solution was because having constant health bars following the zombies around would have been graphically too taxing for the game, and considering we are already struggling with loading issues for the game, we didn't want to make that issue any worse. 

The Pop ups where done by creating a seperate canvas then the main canvas, this is because the script added to the canvas makes the UI appear when the Zombie prefab calls for it when it takes damage, and the after the pop up has been called, it only has a limited lifespan before disappearing off the screen again. If this script was add to the main canvas it would cause the main UI to disappear until a zombie took damage and then would only stay on screen for the set lifespan, and then would disappear again (Which is not what we wanted).
The pop ups are made to randomly spawn around the zombies, and are designed to arch away from the zombie. The number that can be seen as the damage pop up is the amount of damage that each bullet inflicts, which is 25hp, with the zombie having a total of 100hp, meaning that as long as the correct contact is made between the bullet and zombie only 4 bullets are needed to destroy the zombie.  

When in game the player can see the damage pop up numbers clearly, but because itch has a file size requirement, the numbers are quite blurry in the gif.

Camera Rotation:

After many wasted hours we still can't seem to integrate a system that allows the player to look around while the character doesn't move. So we have left the original system, but still added a few tweaks to it. While the camera while somewhat follow the player when they move left and right, the camera's main rotation is through the mouse. So when playing the game we suggest player's only rely on the mouse to rotate the camera rather then trying to use the player to rotate the player. 

We also tried to add a couple of camera effects, by having the camera shake when the player shoots and when the player sustained an attack from a zombie, but we found when we successful implemented these effects it messed with the aim alignment, because the camera would shake, which would unintentionally move the mouse position, thus causing the bullet's final destination to be altered. So unfortunately we had to take away the camera shakes and leave the normal camera. Unfortunately, we also forgot to take GIFs of the shaking cameras before reverting the project back, so you'll have to use your imagination for the mysterious shaking camera. 

Minor fixes:

Some minor fixes the team has made to the game include;

• Fixing the lighting in scene 2
  • This was a quick fix through increasing the directional light, by increasing its intensity, this allowed for the path in front of the player to light up more of the surrounding environment.

• Lowering the game volume
  • All game sound effects were changed so their sound volume = 0.5, this lowered the in game volume so sound effects can still be heard but won't overwhelm players.

• Increasing the difficulty of the game
  • To increase the difficulty of the game was quite easy, all we needed to do was make more zombie spawners within the map, Increase the number of zombies spawned for each wave, and edit the time between each zombie wave. By doing this this increase the difficulty of the game without making the game too hard to complete. 

Load Time Issues:

Our biggest issue that was found with the game was that it took way too long to load for the first time, because of this players tended to get frustrated about the wait time. We tried multiple solutions to try and fix the issue. 
The first step we tired, was too remove any assets from the project that weren't being used. After that did nothing we moved to the next step that was to remove any items within the game that might be too graphically heavy, including the vehicles in the first scene. We also tried to change the compression file from Brotli to GZip, but unfortunately one of the files within the Gzip build exceeded Itch's file size, and making the GZip build unplayable in the browser. 

Unfortunately for the team, none of these solutions worked in reducing the time it takes to first load the game on Itch. So currently the team is at a loss as to how we can fix this issue. We are unsure that we will be able to fix the issue before submitting the final draft of the game.