Dead Metal Punks Bug Fixing

After releasing the demo on greenlight I have been made aware of some bugs and performance issues. Normally I would put them in the backlog and carry on designing, but I want the game to make a good impression. I've went through the game and replicated each of the bugs/performance issues and then worked on a fix for each of them.

Issue log - All Resolved.

Bugs:

• On death menu selects all taking the player back to start of current level instead of requested level.
• Death from falling time longer than intended.
• First Chomper Bot in lily's level had broken motion paths which made it undamagable in certain locations.
• Sound volumes not saving between levels - The saved values were not being pulled when entering a new level to set the volume
• Camera gets stuck for several seconds at bottom of second elevator in section 4
• SFX Slider causing flickering menu sizes.

Performance:

• Boom Explosions causing extreme frame spikes. Reverted to less intensive explosions until I can around to making a new explosion.
• Certain parts of levels causing framedrops. This is due to unnecessary stationary lighting creating large shadows that kill performance, these are all now static.

Self evaluated problems:

These are aspects that I have been wanting to change for a while but since I was removing bugs I implemented these changes.

• Reduced solider model quality in level from 38k poly to 8k poly. This was originally part of the plan but I ran low on time. The entire model was reduced piece by piece and required re-rigging and skinning.
• Increased the movement speed of lily by 50 so she can avoid projectiles easier and generally has better feel.
• Increased player projectile speed on Lily from 1100 to 1700, again its more snappy and feels more impactful at a higher speed.
• Reduced soldier health a small amount and reduced enemy projectile speed from 400 to 300.
• Found that the landscape in Lily's level was 70% of the loaded asset volume, since it can no longer be seen (It was used in initial testing) it has been removed. Loading times and general performance in level is now better.
• Added distance culling for meshes, it isn't noticeable ingame as only things off screen are culled. Adds a little performance gain.
• All in all, the improvements in performance have been massive in certain areas. For example, the hanger would run in editor testing at around 50 fps where as it now runs around 90 fps. Clearly stationary lights can kill performance if overused.