This was my last second year's assignment on Breda University of Applied Sciences. This game was already worked on for 4 months. The last three blocks of year 2 was all about making one game. This block was all about polishment and play testing. I joined this group at the start of this on the last two blocks of the year. 

This block was all about fixing bugs, optimization and play testing. I spent most of my time on play testing. I have helped the art team by making more optimized shaders, and I have fixed some bugs. Furthermore, I also helped my team to implement the graphics settings menu.

The biggest improvement in this game that I have made was optimizing the particle shaders and particle system choice. I noticed that the only problematic shaders were the ones found on the particle systems. All the materials on the particles use transparent textures. I highly recommended using a dithering shader. Dithering will make little holes in the textures. These holes can only be one or zero, so no transparency is used. While you might expect to see textures with holes in it, these holes will be smoothened out by the anti-aliasing. This will make the textures look transparent, while they aren't. Getting rid of most of the transparency can save quite some performance if you use it a lot. Also, the rendering system of Unreal Engine can look quite buggy with transparent textures.

Thanks to this feedback, I helped the art team by making the dithering shader. I have done it before in another project (Uncle Lovecraft's Fun Time Murder Hole (this project will be soon added to this website)), so it was really easy to implement. On that moment I also found out that they were using the old particle system called Cascades. I highly recommanded to switch to Niagra because that system is way more optimized and advanced. 

As last, I have helped with the graphics settings. We found out as a team that no one apparently picked that task up. I took that task and I had to quickly implement a graphics settings menu. The death line was nearly reached, so I didn't have much time left. Together with a UI designer, I made this menu work. He designed the buttons and looks, I did the functionality. Sadly, I was still quite unfamiliar with Unreal at that time, so the menu lacked some polish. If you reopened, all the values did visually reset. But I am glad enough that I could help the players with a weak pc in some way. I also made a few buttons for colour-blind mode. People that are colour-blind can now play our game.