This week we prioritised fixing any remaining bugs and implemented small changes to improve the overall gameplay. 

A major bug to fix was the game crashing whenever the player opened the map. The programmers worked together to discover the issue, which ended up being a function that was no longer being used in the map widget. Once disabled, the game no longer crashed.

To make sure players didn’t look outside and see an empty void, we implemented an environment with foliage surrounding the house using PCG (Procedural Content Generation), a new feature from Unreal Engine 5.2. We made sure this didn’t ruin optimisation by disabling shadows and turning on a setting to cull the trees when the player was too far away from them.

We attempted to remind the player to use time travel to escape the monster by having 'press space to time travel' appear two more times after the first introduction of the monster, but playtesters found it was unnecessarily instructive, and thought it was a bug. We removed it and added it as a hint to the death screen instead.

To make sure the player understood they could time travel to escape the monster, we made the player's camera lock onto the monster when he’s first introduced, so they didn’t accidentally miss learning the mechanic. To create additional tension and enhance fear, post-processing effects combined with a heartbeat sound effect were added. Similar effects were also added to the time travel mechanic, including a breath of relief to indicate when the cooldown of time travel finished, and the camera zooming in and out to show the player travelling through time.