Dev Diary 11
Currently, the status of Lab 77 is as follows:
99 of 109 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining ten, three require further work and seven are awaiting further testing or integration.
Artwork, Music, sound design, scripting and voice acting work is all in progress.
As I wrote about last time, my mission for the past two weeks was to re-do the settings menu to allow for keyboard and gamepad navigation. As I am no fan of doing double work, I was not overly happy to start this task. But after a few days of working on it I managed to make the menu work. Some further refinements may be needed after testing, but I am very happy with how both the menu and the navigation works now.
As can be seen in the gif above I have gone with a horizontal left/right design. I did this because I felt it would be most intuitive and it fit in quite well with the look of the menu panel. The menu seen in the above gif is of course the audio menu and I also made the visual settings menu in the same way. Additionally I decided to cull the possible resolutions to keep the aspect ratio to 16:9, as that is the most common aspect ratio and I believe that will give the best experience given the level design.
In addition to the menu fix I have also worked on implementing the new background art. I briefly mentioned the pipes last week but I have also added new window panels to the backgrounds which will allow much more intricate background designs for all the levels.
Next for Lab 77 is undertaking more playtesting which undoubtedly will reveal many new bugs, and doing another check of the save system just to make sure the settings save properly. In addition, there is still more artwork, music, sound design and voice acting that needs to be done. I can report though that these elements are all being worked on, but quality takes time.
Unfortunately I have not had much time to work on "The Story of E. Rose" the last two weeks. The main update from that project is the inclusion of more sound effects. I am however confident that I will be able to release it some time in April. I just need to add some finishing touches, and of course make the store page. After I am done with this project I may take some time before I start another weekend project but I have had some ideas that might warrant investigation. I also want to try to spend some time investigating more tools such as Ink, RPG Maker XP, Game Maker and Flax as I am curious as to whether I can use either for future projects. If I manage to make something I like with either I may release that, but time will tell.
Lastly, because I can't help myself, I have started outlining a possible next project after Lab 77. This project will be a story based managment-rpg/adventure game. But if you want to know more about it right now you'll have to become a Special Supporter on Patreon (patreon.com/DistilledProductionsLimited) as I'll be sharing more bits of that as well as another possible project through the #sneak-peek channel on our discord which you can access through becoming a Special Supporter.
That is all for this dev diary, more to come in two weeks.
Thank you for reading.
- Olav