The Anthology of Touch Ups

Throughout the last few weeks, I have been fixing bugs, editing features of the game that received negative feedback from playtesters, and adding small features to the game to make it smoother. Since the last few weeks were more small touch-ups to improve the experience of Disco is Dead, this Log will be a series of small logs to show each of the three categories described above. This is to compliment the tone of work I’ve been through the last few weeks.

Story #1: Invasion of the Dreaded Corountines from the Deep

Multiple sections of our game uses Corountines to have events happen within a set amount of time; the most prominent use of it is in our final boss battle. In this case, Corountines were used to launch an attack after a set amount of time (if no attack were in use) along with the stages of a certain attack; the rule with this was that all attacks had to stop when the player was ready to launch their attacks. Below is a brief line of code of how the code used to be handled:

StopCorountine(“TentaclePoke”);

While for the most part, stopping the Corountine like this stopped the Corountine, certain Corountine would keep going (more specifically: the Corountine with a variable next to them). To help stop this, I researched online for my solution (more focusing on other people who had trouble stopping their Corountine) and found there was a way to handle it: by storing the corountine activated into a private Corountine variable and stopping it like that. Upon discovering this solution, I made note to hold onto it the next Corountines I code along for fixing up previous corountines.

Screenshot of New Code

Story #2: Slap Louder

As Sound Designer on the team, it is my job to record all of the foley sound and implement them in the game in a way that would help immerse the player into the experience; this was done at the beginning so that sound wouldn’t be overlooked and, more importantly, for the slaps to sound perfect. Since slapping is the main mechanic of the game, along with one of the selling points of the game, it was important that they sounded satisfying and be the sound effect people will remember about the game. This proved unsuccessful at the beginning when people couldn’t hear the slaps and, for those who could, said they felt unsatisfying. Upon hearing this feedback, I immediately jumped onto fixing it; the first step I took was consult an expert in sound design regarding the slap sounds and get his input on it. He had plenty of feedback on how to improve on the slaps, along with the other sound effects in the game; the first steps he recommended for the slaps were to play with the EQ levels of the slaps to make them stand out more along with experimenting listening to the sounds on different speakers. He also recommended to try colliding different textures together to make a unique slap sound.

I followed through with his first recommendations and adjusted the sound’s EQ and Reverb on Studio One along with listening to the slaps on different speakers. While at first, the differences wasn’t too obvious however, once I added it into the game, the sound was more satisfying and noticeable. While the sounds haven’t been playtested with more playtesters, the team seemed to agree that the sounds were an improvement. Included below are links of the original slap sound and the new slap sound.

Original Slap | New Slap

Future plans include getting more playtesters to determine the satisfaction level of the slapping sound. If room for improvement is found, I will improve them. If they are still as unsatisfying as the original slaps, I will re-record the slaps by colliding different textures against each other.

Story #3: Loading Screen to the Rescue

Throughout the playtesting sessions, it grabbed my attention that switching between scenes caused a temporary freeze. This came across as awkward and left a jerky transition between scenes. To fix this, a loading screen was implemented; the plan was to include a white fade in/out between scenes, a rotating loading icon to show the game hasn’t crashed, and a small percentage value on screen to show how much more the player needs to wait (while fast computers didn’t need it since transitions were quick, slower computers needed it since loading took a while). The first step I took was researched how other Unity developers handled loading in their game; this resulted in me finding a code that would load the assets of the scene before loading the scene itself. By using this code, I was able to make it so that I could make a Custom Load script that would include all of the features described earlier appear while a scene is loading in a way that the game doesn’t freeze.

The transition between levels as described.

This code was also used for the transition between the game’s Splash Screen (where the team’s logo would appear) and the start screen (as seen above before the main game). Using the same logic, I started the unloading of assets to begin as soon as the splash screen animation started; that way, once the animation was done, the start screen would be completely loaded and transition more smoothly than if the unloading of assets was done as soon as the loading of scene was done.