Developmental Problems and Known Issues

While it was fun to develop this game for a jam, it did give me major problems, especially on the last day of submission, which almost made me quit the jam.

Music Player Issue - Minor

This one wasn't very difficult to solve.

I wanted to make the music play after 1 second of the initial input so the music doesn't start blasting as soon as the game starts. Movement inputs are ticked so i need to make sure it starts playing a random song once. The problem came in the case if player decides to play music manually when the game starts, The above function would skip the song.

The Song would also sometimes randomly skip and would start playing the next song. This was a problem with the way i was timing the music itself. I was using a delay instead of an actual timer function which can paused/resumed and can be set to different lengths. The delay would still be counting down even if the player pauses the music.

Water Plugin - Major

This one gave me headaches and it almost made me abandon the project. The water plugin that comes with Unreal Engine 4.26 and up is fascinating and a bit messy. Water morphs and changes the landscape's height map which it wasn't doing for me and in turn wouldn't recognize which water source I was using (River, Ocean, Lake etc) so everything would just default to either lake water or ocean.

The problem was since the plugin is a bit buggy and wouldn't recognize my landscape, the water itself would disappear whenever I would load into the level again, for the 1st level, I reverted to my personal water blueprint but after doing that the water plugin recognized the landscape now and completely ruined its height map with no way to go back. But I was able to recover by deleting the water brush manager and landscape water brush manager which made most of the landscape return back to normal, the rest I sculpted again.

The 2nd level's landscape was recognized at first and the river actually flowed but after finishing the whole level's design it suddenly decided to first screw up the height map again and then after fixing that made the water invisible. What was weird is that the water would not appear in standalone game but in the editor, it would be fine. This took a long time to fix, I essentially needed to manually add another water landscape manager and in the landscape settings add both the original manager and the one I manually added.

The 3rd level wasn't that problematic aside from the fact that it wouldn't let me sculpt near the ocean water and would make some parts of the landscape squarish. The problem was fixed by adding the water after creating the landscape and only sculpting the landscape afterward. It still wouldn't let me sculpt near the water but fixed the squares that would suddenly appear.

Known Issues 

• V-Sync not enabled so tearing on the screen unless ran on a Free-Sync/G-Sync monitor
• Resolution defaults to 1280x720, so 720p quality
• Performance issue in the first level 
• Birds visually stutter
• Part of the landscape in the 3rd level is invisible