Recording system and replay tool
I developed this tool for the purpose of making data collection and analysis in my bachelors thesis, which was about how various level design elements affected players navigational decisionmaking, easier and more accurate. During play sessions, the recording system records the players movement and look-rotation at regular intervals and saves that data to a file at the end of the play session. The replay tool can load these files to visualize the recorded data as either dotted paths or as real-time replays. The tool is capable of visualizing multiple recordings at the same time, with functionality for color-coding individual recordings as well as toggling individual recordings visibility. In the real-time replay mode, users can toggle between having a free-flying camera perspective or having the camera perspective of a chosen recording.
This was a very valuable learning experience for me, as it gave me good insight into how easy it can be to overscope a tool with features that aren’t strictly neccessary, and thus how important it is to understand what the end-users needs actually are before developing a tool.