On this assignment done for unit 9 i have gone in extreme details to cover every part of the assignment and have received a distinction grade!! The points on the assignment covered include:
- D2 - Evaluate consistently and comprehensively at least two researched
and realistic solutions to an IT p...
Introduction
In this assignment I have been asked t research an IT project and find solutions to its problems. In this
case the IT project will be my game that I have been developing for the past few months. Currently
there is a lot of bugs, error and issues inside the game which make it unplayable or less pleasing. I will
be using different researching methods to better find these problems and try to fix them as soon as I
can to avoid any player from being unhappy.
Researching
The first part of the assignment will be using different tools (internet, journals, database, libraries, etc)
to find problems inside my game, since my game is a small indie one I won’t be able to find a lot of
issues by googling it since it won’t appear on the search index but I will try to get and receive players
feedback from the game section in the Itch.io website. Other than that, I will be testing the game
myself and stress-test it to show possible frame drops or vulnerabilities that might appear on the
game. The game has been uploaded on the website 2 months ago meaning that I would have received
a lot of players feedback by now on which I will try to look through and investigate. After browsing the
comments and player feedback I could only see one feedback for the game and that was a user asking
me to possibly put a menu screen for the game so they can pause and launch the game any time they
want, this way the user interface will be improved.
The screenshot posted above was the only player feedback I have received which indeed is not a
project issues but rather an improvement on which I will be adding. While developing the game from
scratch by myself I have noticed some unusual frame drops that occurred during different stages of
the game on which those frame drops will make the game feel laggy and not playable. The frame drops
will only occur while I would play the game in low end computers while playing it on a good computer
showed no frame drops or any issues. This means that players on low end computers will experience
issues while playing the game, so I will have to fix it and possibly remove this issue from occurring
again.
I decided to once again go to the game engine (Godot) I
had developed my game with and see the frame drops
for myself so I could investigate them. Once running the
game, I could immediately see the frame drops by
myself and on the debugger menu the record shows
that there was 1fps (highlighted with red) at some
different times which was very problematic since its not
possible to play a game at 1fps.
, Issue Description of issue How was the issue Date found
# identified
1 – Menu Screen The feedback from the plyer suggests that I Player feedback on the 30 January 2022
add a menu screen for my game to improve comment section from
user interface. where the game was
published on
Itch.io
2 – Frame Drops Players with low-end computers will usually Personally identified it on 02 January 2022
experience frame drops during gameplay. the game engine.
3- Colourblind Some people that could play the game might Issue identified on the 02 January 2022
as well just be colour blind which limits the comments from the game
visions of the colours on the game and makes on Itch.io website.
it feel not enjoyable.
Solving the problem with creativity tools
After I have found and investigated the issues, it is time to solve them which is going to be a hard task
and requires time, knowledge, and creativity. There are many ways you can approach the problems
listed above whether that being researching, mind mapping, drawing a diagram, brainstorming or even
group discussions on where I will be chatting with other students to gather help and resources to
possibly approach and fix my project problems and achieve my goals.
Approaching my first issue and executing - Menu Screen
As previously mentioned my first issue for the game was it not having a main menu screen so the
player can interact with the game and start the game or quit it any time they want. To create a game
menu, I will need to do a lot of designing and coding for it. There is about 2 ways you can approach this
issue on where I will go over both of them and explain them in details.
First Response – Create 2d Menu
The best method I have come so far for the first problem was to create a simple diagram and draw my
idea on what my main menu for the game should be looking like. I went into photoshop and started
adding text and images together so I could create a menu board.
After some good hours on photoshop I
decided that this should be my final design
for my game main menu screen. The design
of it should be rather simple and not contain
many features since my game is not that big
and an advanced menu won’t be necessary.
I looked at other game menus and decided
that for my menu there should only be 3
buttons which will be “Start, Options and
Quit”
,All of these 3 buttons will serve their own purpose, the
start button will be used to start the game, options would
be used to change settings about the game and the quit
button will make the player quit the game once clicked.
For the background of the menu I decided to use a plain
blue colour so it would be simple. The font used is a
pixelated one which is free copyrighted one meaning that
I can freely use it without any CC issues. To better put it
into perspective in how the buttons will work and interact
with each other I also decided to create a Flowchart.
Now that the menu design is completed it is time to create the menu and add the C+ code on it so the
menu will be interactive once a button is clicked. I do not have any coding experience that much so I
had to turn into online forums and apps like YouTube and look for tutorials on how I could complete it.
Luckily, I found a lot of those tutorials and I followed some of them to get an idea on what code I
should put and the debugging process behind it. The whole coding process took me around 2 hours
from start to finish.
Second Response – Create console screen
After being complete and finishing the first response process, now is time to think about a second way
to approach this problem in case the first one is not good enough or is not proven to work. There is not
a lot of alternative responses you can choose for your main menu screen but the best one I could think
of was creating a console for the screen. How a console works is the user pressing a key on the
keyboard to bring the console up and from there they can type a command. This idea is very popular in
a lot of games like Minecraft and it works perfectly and its easy to use. I decided that there should only
be 7 commands in total. When a player loads in the website they will need to press the “/” button and
from there a small console textbox will appear on the top on where they will add the mentioned
commands. The commands will be serving unique purposes, like the /start will start the game and /quit
will quit the game.
Command Command Description
/start This command will be used to start the game from the menu screen.
/quit This command can be used to quit the game once your inside of it.
/reset This command will reset the score of your character and set it to 0 from the
beginning.
/score This command will display the highest score to you.
/volume This command will be used to increase or decrease the volume of the game, for
example volume-20%.
/level This command will be used to change the difficulties of your game, for example
level-hard
/quality This command will be used to change the graphics quality of your game, for example
quality-low or quality-high
, The above image shows the command table I have created for my game. To open the table, you will
need to press the “/” on the keyboard and the table will show up, from there you can enter any of the
mentioned commands and they will perform a certain action. This way the player can start the game
and change the settings of it manually rather than hovering the mouse up and down on the screen.
Approaching my second issue and executing - Frame Drops
During the play time and testing the players and me myself have noticed a lot of frame drops occur
during different stages of the gameplay. To fix it I have come with 2 different possible solution
outcomes on which I will be explain both of them. If a player experiences low frames inside a game it
would make the game unplayable and ruin the whole point of it.
First Response –Automatically render game settings based on GPU power
Now that my first problem is done with I need to focus on the second one which is the frame drop
issue for low end computers. Just as the previous one there is many ways you can approach this
problem but the most useful one that I found was group discussion and online group feedback. I
decided to use a MS Forms feedback page on where other students would suggest ideas on how to fix
the frame drops. I got some responses but the most common one was suggesting me to automatically
change the quality settings for lower computers. How this would work would be the game
automatically detecting the computer hardware inside and change the quality settings depending on
how good the hardware was. If the GPU is bad the game will lower the settings and if the GPU is good
the game will increase the graphics settings. This method is very popular and used in a lot of games
and has proven to be efficient. After receiving the feedback from other students, I decided that their
response was right and I should use it to fix the frame drop issues for low-end computers. Luckily
the Godot game engine has a built-in option which allows to change graphics settings for specific
computers with a click of a button meaning that a lot of time would be saved from coding. All that I
The responses received from the MS
would have to do now would be to go on the settings page and reconfigure this setting.
Forms confirmed that indeed my
game has frame drops and I needed
to fix that since more than 80% of
the people were having it. This could
be partially because the systems
they are using are weak and cannot
run games with good graphics so the
best way would be to change the
graphics and lower them so the GPU
they are using wont struggle
calculating the graphics.
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