Dev diary 16
Currently, the status of Lab 77 is as follows:
124 of 128 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining four, one require further work and three require more testing or minor fixes.
Artwork, music, sound design and voice overs are being worked on.
In the last two weeks I have released Lost Selves, and made more progress on Lab 77. To read more about Lost Selves, check out this post, and if you want to buy the game you can do so here. In short, I wanted to experiment more with Godot, and I had been developing the idea for a short adventure-horror game in the back of my mind for a few weeks. Thus I decided to set aside two weeks of development time, and see where that brought me. In the end, I was happy with the result, and decided to release it. I did also spend some time after the release on making minor improvements to the game as well as implementing a small side quest, and I might come back to it in the future to further expand on it.
I also pushed a small fix and update to The Story Of E. Rose. I did some testing and found an error after you fixed the reactor which I have now fixed. I also decided to add a custom cursor, which I had been thinking about adding for quite some time. You can check out the update here.
For Lab 77 I have been working on ironing out more of the bugs in the backlog and applying more polish. So far, I have added some physics to the jump particles to make them fall rather than just shoot out the sides. I have also worked on some technical aspects of the game, such as making sure the resolutions and refresh rates are culled to the range available on the hardware you'll use when playing. I did find culling the refresh rates a bit difficult thanks to my laptop apparently reporting being able to do 144hz in Unity, instead of the 60hz which the NVIDIA control panel reported but I was able to resolve this.
I also made a small adjustment to the death blocks. Having given their functionality some thought, I decided to re-implement them re-setting you to the start on medium difficulty, but without erasing the progress you have made with placements up to that point in the level. I have kept the easy mode resetting to the floor you previously had contact with, and hard mode doing a full level reset. I also decided to have the falling-too-far-down death to have the same functionality, as I think it is best to have uniformity with this.
Furthermore, I have implemented a high contrast mode. This mode is an accessibility setting which is intended for visually impaired people to allow for an easier time playing the game. I implemented this by adding a translucent layer of gray over the background while adding some yellow tint to S539-77 to make the sprite contrast more with the background. I am aware that this may need further testing and refinement, but I believe I have made a good start on it.
Lastly, I have yet again undertaken a re-do/fix of my level design. I identified 22 of the 77 levels which could either do with improvement or which need a complete re-do. I have worked on the levels I identified and now I will need to do some new data gathering as well as playtesting to make sure the changes I made were worth it. This also unfortunately means that quite a bit of my old data is now no longer usable, but I will simply have to gather more.
That is all for this dev diary, more to come in two weeks.
-Olav