Dev Diary 18: Testing, Testing, Testing
Currently, the state of Lab 77 is as follows:
117 of 128 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining 11, five require further work and six require more testing or minor fixes.
Artwork, music, sound design and voice overs are being worked on.
In the last two weeks of working on Lab 77 I have mainly been focused on testing and QA. As I mentioned last dev diary, I have been testing and refining the level design with the aim of ensuring placements in all levels except for one special level. This work is largely complete now, but I still aim to test the levels more to ensure that I meet this goal. Additionally, I have been finding more bugs in this playtesting process.
These bugs have not been major, except for one issue with the conveyor belts and camera that has proven to be very difficult to replicate. It is possible that this stems from a small fix I did to the behaviour of the conveyors, but it is difficult to determine without being able to replicate the bug. The bug in question is that if the player moves along the the direction of a conveyor that is long enough, there is a chance that the camera locks itself to the player, which should not happen. I should add that this issue is not game-breaking in any way but it is an odd behaviour that I would very much like to remove from the game. I did attempt to solve this using Vector3.SmoothDmaping(), which in fairness did solve the issue. Though it introduced a lot of jittering that I was not able to resolve. I had also noticed a small issue with the velocity of the player when emerging from a teleport-to block, but I have resolved this by simply zeroing the velocity of the player.
As motioned last time I had been drawn back into Lost Selves. I decided to do some more work on the story of the game, adding another small side quest as well as an epilogue to round off the story. With this, I believe my development of Lost Selves has come to an end. With that comes a potential for a new side project, though what this project would be I am not sure. As always, if you are interested in seeing the behind the scenes of my next side project and of Lab 77, you can join as a Special Supporter on Patreon.
Lastly, The Story Of E. Rose and Lost Selves are still on sale for 50%. Get both here now!
That is all for this dev diary, more to come in two weeks.
-Olav