Dev Diary 21: Steam!
Currently, the state of Lab 77 is as follows:
132 of 143 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining 11, three require further work and eight require more testing or minor fixes.
Artwork, music, sound design and voice overs are being worked on.
In the last two weeks some progress has been made on Lab 77 again. So far I have implemented some new backgrounds with multiple parallax layers as you can see below. The intention is to have all the backgrounds largely look like this, with some exceptions and special levels.
Furthermore, I have again started working on the aforementioned camera issue. I have unfortunately not been able to solve it yet, but I have done more investigation into the root cause of the camera locking. This investigation has led me to believe that the camera locking happens because of the player character being moved differently when on the conveyor belt than when they're moved by player inputs. I do believe I can resolve all of these problems if I change the way the character is moved, but I can not say for sure just yet. This will be the continuing task I undertake for the next two week, or until I finally resolve it.
Moreover, I have finished the script writing for the voice over lines. In total there are 11 voice over lines per difficulty, which will be somewhat randomly distributed. These will be recorded soon, and then implemented with an overall sound manager system because I don't trust whatever inbuilt systems are in Unity anymore. I'd rather just engineer it myself so I can make it work the way I need it to.
So the order of events going forwards will be:
Fix the camera/movement
Implement a sound manager/system
Implement artwork as it comes in.
Another pair of big updates:
Distilled Productions Limited is now a Steamworks developer!
I have been working on both the Steam and itch.io pages for Lab 77, and I'll have links available for both soon
In other news, I made some changes to the website. I updated the home page, and I have started posting these dev diaries to the website. I will still post them in their full length to Reddit, Patreon, LinkedIn and Cohost as I have been, but I wanted to have a better place to store them for the future and a page where I had more control of the formatting.
That's all for this dev diary, more to come in two weeks!
- Olav