This week was an especially fun week for Strain's development. Andrew, my partner in programming crime, and I started working on the genetic algorithm that handles the zombie evolution. Admittedly, Andrew put more work into it that I did but it was still a rewarding experience. I spent a lot of time working on other gameplay mechanics, such as adding pick-ups (weapons, ammo) and random loot spawners, as well as UI elements and visual representations of important information (like player health, stamina, and individual zombie statistics).
The red and blue bars show health and stamina. The boxes next to the capsules with the red bars show stats individual to that NPC. The green capsule with statistics is a human who was bitten but hasn't turned yet.
Whenever I wasn't working on new features I had the pleasure of fixing bugs. So many bugs. Our last scene was apparently scaled up hundreds of times and so was incredibly large. We fixed this in the current scene, but it required a lot of code be rewritten to work for the new scaling, and of course lots of tweaking of prefabs and values in the scene itself to get it to work as intended. There were other bugs too: lighting issues, transparency issues, scripting issues, pathing issues. I managed to source out and fix lots of these bugs, and the game plays a lot more nicely now, but there are still many hiding within our game that simply refuse to get fixed. I foresee much more time bug fixing in store for me.
Our artists managed to add more assets to the game, so as it stands now we have several types of houses and streetlights populating our level, and while they are un-textured, they provide life to the game that I felt was missing in last weeks build.
Our artists managed to add more assets to the game, so as it stands now we have several types of houses and streetlights populating our level, and while they are un-textured, they provide life to the game that I felt was missing in last weeks build.
I plan to spend the next few days bugfixing and adding in sound effects and random effects to make the game feel so much juicier.