With this week being the deadline for the beta version, I continued to polish the game. The first thing on the list was to tweak the menu. Now that the game was going to be played on a website, I decided to remove the settings button and submenu, alongside with the now redundant levels button and submenu. Now the menu consists of just the logo and a 'Play Game' button, that while it seems bare-bones, hopefully, there would suggest improving on it later in the Beta feedback.
The next step was to do a test/run-through of the choices to quickly check that each choice was correctly connected to their scenes and generally that nothing stood out of place when the game is played. In the first run-through, I noticed that some scenes were not being activated after a choice button was clicked, but that was quickly resolved when I noticed that their placement in the hierarchy was wrong - in most cases, the next scene was placed 'before' a scene that had already taken place so it was just hidden (a bit similar to a previous issue not being able to load the background).
Later in the evening, when it was time to build (or export) the game, I was worried that it meant a point of no return, as Murphy's law states - anything that can go wrong will go wrong. I then took it upon myself to create a backup of the game, both locally (by duplicating the Unity file), and on the cloud via GitHub.
It took me a while to get it onto the cloud due to a slow internet connection, so in the meantime, I found a handy tutorial about some of the things I need to consider before I build the game, which was all found under build settings. One thing I learned and noted for the future, that when building for Windows or macOS, the operating system you initially use to build your Unity game will be the only option out of the two to build (fortunately webGL and mobile can be built to regardless).
So because of that, I would have to do a video walkthrough of the game as a backup submission. Another thing I took into account was set up the game's resolution, as I noticed later when the game was built that it did not encompass the whole screen and that there were black empty borders when played on a different resolution on my laptop (in comparison to my main computer where everything looked fine). This will be something I will have to some research later when considering the appropriate resolution for the game when it is played on a website (as it would probably not have to take up the entire screen). But all in all, the game ran smoothly without any crashes, the background music looped perfectly, and the choices ran correctly.
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