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Relevance of Troubleshooting in our game:
It is important when developing a game that any of the problems encountered during development are documented so that in the future these issues can be solved much easier and in less time. During this project we had quite a few challenges and hurdles to overcome. On this page you will see some of the problems we had during development, as well as problems we uncovered during user testing, and how we overcame these issues.
Pink Textures
During some of our asset importing our modeler had issues where the textures were only showing up as pink no matter what he did. I knew from using Unity before that the issue was that the materials needed to be upgraded to the HDRP settings in Unity for them to be displayed in this pipeline.
You can see more on the issue here: https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/hdrp-materials-remain-pink-when-they-are-upgraded-to-hdrp-materials
GitHub Conflict
We had an issue with our GitHub repository where one of the files that a member of our team uploaded conflicted with one already on the repository. The result of this was that our team member was unable to push the item causing a conflict. To fix this we had to exclude this item during the commit and once they pulled the changes they had to redo the work on that one object.
Lighting not casting shadow
I had an issue where the lights were originally not casting any shadows on the walls or objects in the scene. From exploring the settings for lights I found that it was due to the fact that the option for lights to cast shadows was not enabled.
Nuked our game
We had an issue today where an upload from one our team members caused the scene to become corrupted and no longer display in Unitys editor. To fix this I had to revert the commit that they made which did luckily restore the scene to working condition. Unfortunately their work had to be redone but it was a small price compared to losing all the work.
Helping team Trebuchet
Today we had team presentations. One of the other teams developers was having an issue with raycasting on a U.I affecting the objects in the background. I showed them how to fix this by enabling the block raycast option on the image component.
Helping team Nova
The A.I developer on team Nova was having issues with their sheep not properly patrolling to the points they wanted on their map. After looking at their code I found that they were manually trying to calculate how far the sheep were from the object. This was what was causing the issue as the objects Y component was always above the patrol point which meant it never reached it. I showed them the build in IsPathComplete option as well as a few others inside the NavMeshAgent that could help them. By the end I managed to help them get the sheep patrolling their game as expected.
COVID-19
With the college permanently closed from COVID-19 it drastically changed how things functioned for every team. To make sure that we continued our game progress without interruption we adapted in several ways. The first thing we did was make sure we had a constant channel of communication available. This was done in the form of discord. Here we used a channel that was solely dedicated to our game. Any work that we did was put up here and any time we needed to communicate with each other for meetings or just general discussion of work we could meet in this group chat.
We also had the ability to share screens in this application which meant that if anyone was having an issue we could see their screen allowing us all to work on the problem together.
Finally for presenting our work to lecturers we used Zoom. This allowed us to have a big meeting room where the lecturing panel could view our world and give us feedback on our progress.
Overall we found that due to the fact we didn't have to commute to college we managed to do more work than originally planned and our velocity actually increased.