Dev Diary 12
Currently, the status of Lab 77 is as follows:
108 of 121 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining 13, five require further work and eight are awaiting further testing or integration.
Artwork, Music, sound design, scripting and voice acting work is all in progress.
It appears my settings troubles were not over last time I wrote a dev diary. Having done some testing I found that my fullscreen toggle was broken and somehow became inverted, and my culling of resolutions somehow worked fine in the Unity editor but not so fine in the build. Which, thanks Unity, is probably because the editor deals with its sizing weirdly. However, after some help I was able to make it work, and now the fullscreen toggle indeed toggles correctly, though I have not been able to adequately test my resolutions fix. However, I ran into much larger issues through working on the settings.
After I noticed that my control rebinds were not saving properly I fell down a rabbit hole of controls issues. These issues effectively led me to a point where I had to decide if I wanted rebindable controls or a movable character. I am still not quite sure as to where the root of the problem lies as debugging it was not a straightforward process, however I have determined there are two ways for me to resolve it. Unfortunately both involve me practically re-doing a bunch of work, which I am not a fan of doing. But as my intention for this game is not to craft it to a high standard of quality, I have to resolve this now. I do also still intend to keep gamepad functionality, which does complicate the situation a bit.
This also happened, which did not help much either:
Due to these issues I was not able to perform any meaningful playtesting. And I am not going to be able to perform any playtesting until I have resolved the input issue, which is my top priority going forward. I had also hoped that I would have a good build to playtest with last Saturday but that build had the issue shown in the above gif. I do still need to do more playtesting and gather more data on placements per level so I can accurately set the limitations for medium and hard modes. Hard mode will be limited to the average number of placements rounded down, medium will be average number of placements rounded down plus four.
For "The Story Of E. Rose", it is now finally out: https://distilledproductions.itch.io/the-story-of-e-rose. I also did a longer write-up about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DistilledProductions/comments/1c247ye/the_story_of_e_rose/.
Lastly, I have had the chance to look at Ink and RPGMaker XP. From what I have been able to gather neither is going to be overly useful for my process. Being a developer, I very much prefer object-oriented languages such as C# and Ink is a markup language. And as an aside, I'm not a fan of declaring variables just using "var" instead of a type which Ink does. Now, I could integrate it with Godot for instance but I don't see a reason to as I could reproduce any functionality I'd need from Ink myself. This is not to say that Ink is a bad tool, but I think it is quite clear that I am not the target audience. And as I am not likely to make a JRPG as of yet, RPGMaker XP is not a tool I see much use for at the moment. I do intend to try to make a small game using Flax that I would hope to release on itch.io when it is done.
That is all for this dev diary, more to come in two weeks.
Thank you for reading.
- Olav