Our client meeting for week 13 was relatively brief, and mostly revolved around us discussing the development of the live event system and the updates to the athlete uniforms. The clients were happy with the changes to the uniforms, and were excited to see the live event system up and running.
We began building a 3d model of a stadium for use as a background within the game, as our current yellow background felt very bland. We decided to stick with the rounded look that was used for building the models of the game components to create artistic unity within the scene. Additionally we created an audience for the stadium by using randomizing the order of several audience member sprites to give the stadium a feel of variety. When the stadium was introduced into the game however, we saw a 40 fps drop in quality. The stadium needs to be either optimized or replaced with something more efficient. After reducing the number of polygons in the stadium we saw a jump in performance, but it was still not quite at the quality that we were looking for, so we decided to optimize it further. Ultimately we had to scrap the dynamically generated audience, and settled for a static audience instead. This got us back within an acceptable 45-60 fps range.
We continued to refine the live event system, but noticed some serious flaws in its operation, since it was a time based system players who have completed less levels would always be featured at the top of the leader board until they completed more levels. Furthermore this problem was exacerbated by the fact that we had only given players 5 minutes to complete all of the levels in the event, so when the event finished these players who had not completed all of the levels would end up winning the event. We are going to need to redesign the entire scoring mechanism in order for the live event system to work properly.