The Concert - Behind the Scenes

As with most live presentations, we were still working on the game up until the concert. Between unfinished assets, bugs, and glitches, there were several areas to contend with. The day before, a list of contingency plans were created in the event of a crash or a game breaking bug, and a "break glass in case of emergency" video was crafted. This video showed a complete playthrough of the game, just in case the live presentation wasn't going to work. 

Since we weren't working with Git or any file storage, there was only a singular copy of the game. In essence, both of us had items to complete prior to the concert, but only one person could work at a time. While one of us was working in Unreal, the other person would draft out what they needed to do, write pseudocode, sleep, etc. After kicking off and finishing a production build at 4AM on the day of the concert, there was just enough time to put in place the final cinematics. 

Arriving at the concert hall in the morning for a rehearsal, we ran through the level a few times. It quickly became evident that there were still bugs remaining in the game that could cause serious issues come concert time. With only a few hours to fix them, we holed up near the concert venue and went to work. Two core issues presented themselves. One was a glitch involving the mouse moving to an unknown location on the screen, forcing the game to cease mouse input (more on that later). The other involved the player getting stuck in collision when exiting a steal. Thankfully, the collision issue was simply fixed by enabling a toggle to disable collision on certain assets in the scene. A performance checklist was also created, so that we knew what order to complete tasks in that looked the best visually, and satisfied the director's vision.

As for the actual concert performance, most of it went off problem free! We did briefly encounter the mouse glitch late into the run, but after roughly 10 seconds control resumed. Even with the additional pressure of the concert, most of the steals were successfully completed. However, if we did run into trouble, a toggle was created wherein we could artificially boost our score and win the game. 

Below is a video from the concert. The video intercuts between the live camera feed and the prerecorded backup video footage as the screen was difficult to see from the concert footage. Because of this, the player's progress through the level changes as it represents 2 different playthroughs.