And so Alice woke up and the Game Art students finally went to sleep. The End.

Looks like we made it. Just about.

There wasn't even a wave of relief at the end of this, just a load of stressed students eyeing the computers suspiciously like it couldn't actually be true.

It was a somewhat stressful conclusion, problems naturally started appearing that needed to be fixed. I came in and Dominic had me play through a couple of times for suggestions and to spot any issues, we spotted a few minor fixes then I found two game breakers.

The first being the collectible tart in front of the rabbit hole. I found while fooling around a little that if you jump right you can grab the tart as you enter into the rabbit hole, which will promptly crash the game. We guessed it was caused by the script trying to register the pick up and store it to be reloaded on the way back while loading the next level. So, to avoid it happening to a player we moved the tart safely out the way. 

Next up was with the riddle puzzle over in the Dark World. On my second play through of it I had some trouble picking up the bag of marbles and ended up kicking them through the world, breaking the puzzle and trapping Alice in the dark world with the Mad Hatter which does not bode well for the girl's future. So Dom scripted in a respawn for the pieces should they fall below a certain height on the map.

These were problems I found when I was just trying to play the game, the real headaches came when we asked classmates to play and their soul agenda was to break it. They well and truly put the blocking volumes to the test, which held up in the main level but once again the dark world proved tiresome.

Firstly one of them walked off straight down the river and wandered off into the black, empty abyss that would have been the gardens in the main level. After that they just started being all out destructive.

My mistake was assuming they'd play the puzzle, that was a foolish thought. Everyone proceeded to pick up the objects and swing them around the screen, attempted to throw them over the blocking volumes and into the woods, onto the roof of the house and naturally they flung the pieces through the world and across the map. Kicking them through the map wasn't a huge issue since I'd already found that but when they throw the marbles blindly around the area finding them becomes a very 'needle in haystack' situation. One player was particularly skilled at breaking things (looking at you Emily!) and after lobbing a vase at the Mad Hatter what happened could only be described as the Hatter activated a bubble shield. In reality what actually happened was they had actually managed to pick up the sphere volume around the Hatter that registers if you're carrying an item and this disabled player overlap so we couldn't get near the Hatter to finish the puzzle and Alice was doomed to her fate once again. Dom fixed that.

We went through several of these wonderful encounters and while every problem they managed to create was actually helpful since we could try and address the issue, it didn't make me want to beat them with the keyboard any less.

Then came the bane of all our lives for about four days.

Even with repeated attempts on several computers and even a couple of ritual sacrifices the lighting did not want to bake. It just kept crashing at random intervals leaving us stuck, confused and all together fed up. The only solution to be found was to bake on preview lighting which by Friday afternoon it was agreed was better than nothing.   

The end of the week we were taken out of action by documentation so that was end of working on the level for now.

So the project comes to a close. They team did great and I'm impressed with what we achieved in the end. I would like to have done more in terms of my own contribution but overall I feel the project was a success.