What Got Done

• This week started out with a presentation on Tuesday so I spent a good amount of time making sure we got as much into the build as possible and then making sure it worked well.  This included a lot of little fixes from recent playtests and tweaks to make sure the game continued to perform well.  This also included a new map that I worked on with Jonathan for the presentation. 
• The day after the presentation was a playtesting session with Ryan's residents.  We had 8 players which was especially useful to see how the game performed with that many people playing at once.  We also got a ton of useful player feedback.  
• I spent most of my time this week working on territory.  After noticing huge lag spikes in the profiler when placing and removing towers I decided to actually time how long those operations actually took.  Placing a tower took about 0.2 seconds and removing a tower took an entire second!  I had known this section of code was inefficient but I hadn't realized quite how bad.  So after some heavy refactoring, the operations for adding and removing territory each only take about 0.02 seconds (essentially negligible and it won't change with map size).  After the playtesting session on Wednesday we realized our current design of territory wasn't going to work.  A possible alternative that we are looking to test is contested territory.  
  
• With contested territory you can no longer just drill a hole to your opponent's base and spam towers.  Now when two opposing towers share territory, no one will be able to place new towers in the contested territory until one of the towers is destroyed.  This also puts more emphasis on units for territory control.
• Refactor of the manager class that handles entities to make it easier to get a valid entity reference.
• Refactor of how we handle death and added death animations to all of the units.
• Created an 8 player map for the playtesting session.
• Fixed a bunch of misc errors after the playtesting session.
• It's no longer possible to make it into a lobby before the host enters the lobby.
• Played around with the shader code that we use for health bars so we no longer need to use 2 materials to get the effect we want.  This took a decent chunk out of the total number of draw calls while playing.

What's Next

• It seems like Kail's units/towers/superunits are wrapping up, so hopefully I will be able to put those in this week.
• More work on performance optimizations to make the game smoother with more than 4 players.

Total time:  34 hours