The Final Stretch

As we move into the end of the semester we've passed some important milestones, with some final polish and paperwork remaining.

Within the scope of the project was always the desire to create an interactive story with an atmosphere to boot. With this in mind we set out to create as many of the assets ourselves as possible, to ensure it would stay consistent throughout.As we've closed in on the project's end-date we realized the amount of work that'd be required to see that vision through was staggering, so we resorted to sampling models from various artists through the websites opengameart.org and blendswap.com.

Thankfully the resources provided there were not only of good quality, but mostly consistent and game-ready to boot, requiring only minor alterations to fit in better.

With the visual fidelity kicked into high gear we also started seeing significant performance drops when certain situations and combinations of objects arose. The hunt for performance increase was on!

Stripping assets of their general usability and only leaving the attributes we needed saved us some performance and smoothed things over slightly. Necessity is the mother of invention, in this case she also birthed curiosity for some of the aspects of rendering a scene on screen that's handled and nicely tucked under the hood in Unity, out of sight and out of mind, at least until it's optimization time. As we scoured the net for information about Unity's culling and algorithms for calculating light we quickly realized several mistakes, some of which were very basic and easily corrected, on our part.Armed with a better understanding we tackled the problems caused by prior mistakes, and made sure our final changes would follow stricter standards.

With the deadline looming it's looking pretty good on a general level, but as with all things we're noticing prior mistakes and omissions (such as a varied set of sound effects) that we're now frantically working at to improve to an acceptable level, even so, there's only so much one can do with the time allotted.

Closing the Gap

As the deadline draws ever nearer, we've been able to substantially upgrade the visual fidelity of the project.
We recently activated the Unity3D Pro 30-day trial, as the project is due before the trial expires. This gave us the ability to add several impressive post-processing effects to the game, as well as enabling real-time dynamic shadows. 

In other news, the core game mechanics are all but finished, requiring little more than some tweaking before all the pieces are in place.
I've created a global power level for the facility, which will decrease in time, eventually shutting down the entire facility and causing the player to lose the game. All powered objects can be linked either directly to a specified global power level to be the minimum required for them to function, or they can be hooked up to a fuse-controlled power grid, in which all linked objects are controlled by a central fuse box with a specified power requirement. Some of these fuse boxes will be broken initially, requiring the player to fix them in order to access specific areas or devices.

Joachim also finished the parts of the interface that displays emails and messages from a hacked device, all of which are parsed from XML. 
All that remains now is to populate the level itself, and puke out a bunch more assets.

-luxus