Upon entering the Project Beta phase of our game, the Unity programs on the machines we use to work on the game were upgraded from 5.2 to 5.3. This caused some problems, the most apparent being the sudden drop in framerate.

I tried to identify the source of the crippling lag and found that our previous water shader was causing some framerate drops, but it didn’t seem to be the source of the problem. I had found a low poly water shader online from a reddit user called Trolltunga, which I was able to use in place, however I was having some rendering issues which forced me to make a duplicate camera for the water.

This look seemed to fit the aesthetic of our game more as it in supposed to be inside a computer world, having low-poly water brought up ideas such as the water being a sea of data. However implementing this brought up a problem with the shooting mechanic. The raycast script uses the main camera position to calculate where the enemies are and it could not differentiate between the main and secondary cameras resulting in a glitchy, uncontrollable reticle that would stay offscreen most of the time.

Initially I had planned to dedicate this week to incorporating lives, obstacles and score multipliers, but instead I’ll have to focus on fixing up all of the bugs in the game.