Dev Diary 15
Currently, the state of Lab 77 is as follows:
118 of 128 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining 10, three require further work and seven require more testing or minor fixes.
Artwork, music, sound design and voice overs are being worked on.
Having fixed the inputs I spent most of my time working on minor improvements on Lab 77. Having done a bit more playtesting, I had some feedback about the need for some indicator of the player is moved when using the teleportation blocks. To do this I decided to implement directional particle bursts that shoot out of the teleportation blocks in the direction you are teleported in.
In addition, I also added particle bursts on the death blocks that burst from where the player makes contact with the block. This turned into a bit of a faff as I had an issue where the location of the burst would sometimes work perfectly and sometimes would burst from where the player respawned. After quite a bit of confusion I was able to resolve this however by making everything controlled by the player controller script. Not an ideal way of doing it but sometimes you have to write bad code that just works in game development.
I also did some experimenting wit the player hitbox. Since I started working on Lab 77 S539-77 has always been a square, and thus had a square hitbox. However, with the new artwork the sprites are not perfectly square, and as such I thought I could try to use a polygon hitbox to make it more accurate. I implemented this and tested it, but rather quickly determined that it was better to use a square hitbox since the polygon would sometimes result on jittery movement and behaviour which made it seem as if the game was laggy.
Furthermore, I have had some new backgrounds come in. Some minor edits will be made to them, but they already make the game look much better.
Lastly, I have determined that there is some form of deep seated issue with my desktop and Unity. Basically, I noticed that one of the UI buttons in the main menu would throw an error saying the button did not have the OnSelect method after you navigated off of the panel that held the button. Only one button had this issue. And it was not an issue on my laptop at all. I attempted to re-install .NET, transfer the unity install that worked from my laptop to my desktop, clearing the cache and more fixes but nothing worked. I was able to resolve it by deleting and re-implementing the button, but the fact that I was not able to determine the root cause of the issue does worry me. I hope this does not come up again, but it is very difficult to tell whether it will.
In the last week I have also started working on another short term project that I have called Lost Selves. This will be a short game where you have three characters who all have lost their memories, and you have to help them remember. Through this you will learn what brought them together and find out what caused them to lose their memories. I have been sharing a lot of the work on this in the #sneak-peeks channel on the discord which you can access through becoming a Special Supporter on Patreon. I expect to be able to release this on itch.io (where you can also check out The Story Of E. Rose) within two weeks at most.
That is all for this dev diary, more to come in two weeks.
Thank you for reading.
- Olav