DLOG 4: Post Production and Reflection
- Aidan Melville
- May 24
- 6 min read
Finishing up this Dlog series I want to explore the post production process and reflect back on the project. So strap in one last time for a final journey through Crystal Heists post production.
Testing
After I was finished developing Crystal Heist, I built the project in the Unity Engine and tested it out. Testing had been conducted throughout the process within the engine but I wanted to test an independent build of the game before releasing.
When testing I had to go backwards and forwards between Unity and the Game, rebuilding a few times until I was happy with the game and I had ironed out some kinks within the final build before releasing.
Releasing
Once testing was complete and I was satisfied with Crystal Heist, I took to Itch.io to share my game with friends, my course at NFTS and anyone else that wanted to play it.
For this process it was not just a platform I needed in order to release the game but a game page itself.
Having been a gamer for years, I am well versed with game pages, but creating one was not as simple as I thought. I had forgot about screenshots, a trailer, description of my game. You know... the basics.
The the screenshots that was simple, and for creating a walkthrough of the game. I took to the game, played through it a few times, taking screenshots on one playthrough, and recording the game from beginning to end on the second playthrough.
Trailer
Creating a trailer was tricky, I had never explored video editing or video production before so it was something I felt was extremely alien to myself.
I used Microsoft's ClipChamp software to create the trailer. When starting to edit I released the process was a lot like creating animations and cutscenes in Unity, which filled me with confidence, and thankfully the software was easy to use.
After several hours I had finally emerged with a trailer I was happy with, uploading it to YouTube and the games Itch.io page.
Updates
Soon after releasing the game, when playing through the game I noticed a little bug that had slipped passed my testing, I actually noticed it when trying to take screenshots for the projects portfolio page. Then more and more people started experiencing the bug and reporting it to me.
Thank you to everyone that got into touch and reported this issue, it helped me a lot in understanding what happened and where things went wrong during development.
I did actually explore this bug in another Dlog post but to break down the issue, when designing the UI for the player dialogues, I created a display text that would appear to guide them. In the script I added a way of removing the text but I had forgot two crucial elements of this script.
The first one being that I was not checking if the player was able to interact with the display box, meaning they could run the close function at any point, but it would have a negative affect of displaying the interaction text constantly unless you pass over a trigger that cancels out the text.
This issue was easy enough to fix as I already had functions and variables in place to check for player triggers and collisions. The next issues was the player being able to keep moving while the display text was active.
Meaning that if the player left the collider while the display text was onscreen, they could not remove the text. For this I had to programming additional steps in my script so that when the player interacts with the signs which brings up the dialogue, the player will then no longer be able to access the player controller, and the player would have it's renderer frozen to prevent any other issues occurring.
Once these changes were made, I created a new build of Crystal Heist, updated the Itch.io page and added in patch notes through the developer logs to show the game had been updated.
Reflection
Having finished the projected, I wanted to take some time to go through my reflection, including what I have enjoyed during this project, what I have learned during the project and, if given the opportunity to start Crystal Heist over, what I would do differently.
What I Enjoyed
As a whole this project was very exciting, informative and did exactly what I intended, to educate me on making a game
Three areas stood out to me as things I most enjoyed
Level Design
Designing as a whole is amazing for me. Getting to be so creative. Learning how to structure my scene and have the background, midground and platforms all separate to properly control movement and playability.
Programming
Having the chance to expand my understanding and further the skills within C# was really enjoyable, being able to resolve issues and fix problems I faced was very empowering and satisfying, knowing I can do these scripts again and expand on them for future projects.
Cinematics
Something I have always found amazing is cutscenes in games, mini movies that expand the story you are playing. It was fun and enjoyable to play around with timelines and really test my animation skills.
Project Challenges
Below are the challenges I faced during this project, sticking with the theme of three I picked the biggest three challenges of Crystal Heist.
Enemy AI
AI in my game was a huge challenge, I had never tackled this before in courses or via online tutorials. I had to over come a lot of obstacles in learning this, how to have my sprite interact with the world, set up tags and mirror scripts similar to my player controller,
specifically the most challenging element was having an enemy pause, wait a few seconds and continue on moving.
Coroutines was my solution and that helped me to achieve the designed reaction I wanted from my AI, implementing a wait for 4 seconds function, and have that function called when reaching the target position.
Objectives
When designing my objectives I was not sure about how best to go about this. Something that came as a huge challenge was having text of the objectives overlap with interaction text.
For the 'Key' item this was not a problem, a simple script worked fine, but for the chest and crystal it was difficult.
Originally I had the object display saying the chest was opened, then I changed it to collect the Crystal, but ultimately I wanted to show that the Crystal can be interacted with, and the player they were within range.
In the end I had to remove the objective text, it felt redundant and unnecessary.
Key Inputs
Having key inputs was a challenge, deciding which method was best to implement in my game was hard, and getting them to interact correctly. The biggest challenge was how to get the key in the correct position to switch off the text box and when it needed to be checked.
I had an issue post launch where the player could press 'Q' at any moment and that would run the closing the display box, but also displaying the interact text, keeping the text onscreen until you walked back over the signs collider.
For this issue I just had to alter the script to detect if the player was colliding with the sign and if the display box was active.
Given a Reset...
...What Would I Do Differently
Interactions
Given the opportunity to redo this project I would spend more time on the interactions.
I would want more advanced interactions from the crystal popping out of the chest and having a little cinematic animation play, to the key growing in size before disappearing.
I would like the world to feel more alive and interactive if I was to redo this project, and one way to achieve this would be to have the objects do more or have a more significant role.
Enemy AI
AI and the enemies were my highlight of this project, I am so proud of what I learned, achieved and the skills I developed, from zero knowledge to two sets of functioning enemies.
This section has been my biggest triumph and because it was my greatest weakness and challenge.
But if I could redo the project I would like to explore having the enemy notice the player, and chase the player for 'x' distance.
I feel this will be my next challenge in AI.
Levels
Feeding on from the interactions section where I talk about a more alive world, I think something I would like to redo and explore is creating more than one level.
building on this, making the world feel more alive by designing additional levels.
Climb the Dojo to a set point, enter it and keep climbing, then exit back to the roof to acquire the key.
do the same with the castle, have the player scale the castles exterior, and sneak around the interior, mixing up the gameplay.
Summary
This project was super fun and amazing, I have enjoyed every minute of it. It has challenged me in a way that felt fun, exciting and drove my passion further to learn and explore more of the world I am trying to enter.
Crystal Heist has really shown me that I am making the right decision in changing careers, and I am grateful for the support on my project, grateful to the NFTS for my course and for everyone reading this as it means a lot to share my journey with you.
In the next series of my Dlog's, I will be taking you through my next project.
Make sure to watch this space, and remember to check out Crystal Heist on Itch.io
Thank you
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