What a busy final week!
Based on feedback from last week, we added a few small items
to help build out the game experience. The first train conductor the player
interacts with will now point at the train (behind the player) after handing
the player a train conductor’s hat. The Vermin Catcher at the Starting Hub will
now stop and shake his head at the player if they walk into his way or prevent
him from doing his job. (Previously he just ran right through the player, which
was disconcerting.)
Concerned about performance, we updated the Starting Hub’s
look by removing the skybox and adding a circular mesh with new mountains. We
removed the previous mountains since they were using up a lot of
triangles/vertices. We also added more lighting and baked the Starting Hub to
help performance. Additionally, we replaced our existing shaders with a new
shader that is mobile friendly. Everything still looks bright and happy, which
is good.
We also cleaned up our Unity project by removing any unused
assets. We made additional optimizations to the gameplay scripts and redacted
any unused methods. We reduced the number of verts in our passenger meshes to
maximize performance.
We added a new Dining Car scene and have been fleshing it
out. This wasn’t going to be part of the original submission, but we thought it
would better flesh out the vision and demonstrate the player’s progression. The
Dining Car is where the player will have to take orders and serve food prepared
by the chef. We tried to give the same level of personality and polish to the
dining car as we did the passenger car, and our little chef dances as his food
sizzles and pops on his grill. Including this dining car not only demonstrates
how points earned pay off toward additional rewards, but demonstrate the
functionality of navigating from car to car.
We applied a lot of additional fixes and touches to the
game, primarily for performance and test feedback purposes. We’re excited about
how these touches have made the game feel even more complete and polished. Now
all we have to do is submit the final product!
