Dev Diary 24: Demo & More
Currently, the state of Lab 77 is as follows
136 of 144 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining eight , three require further work and five require more testing or minor fixes.
Artwork, music, sound design and voice overs are being worked on.
A demo for the Steam Next Fest is done.
Over the last two weeks my focus has been on polishing and finalising the demo for the Steam Next Fest. This process has revolved around adding sound effects, lasers and a lot of minor UI improvements. There are now sound effects for the UI interactions, collecting notes, hitting the end level button and player movement. They are implemented in a bit of a oversimplified way, but this is because I plan on properly implementing them using Wwise. I also aim to implement the game music using Wwise too.
Furthermore, the chambers of Lab 77 have been outfitted with cleaning lasers. Basically they are there to serve the purpose of killing a player were they to fall off the level, which they don't do if you look at the code. The player is just reset if they fall below -7.5 on the Y axis. More importantly, they serve the purpose of adding more life to the chambers as well as the story which is told through the collectible notes.
I have also spent some time fine tuning the UI. This has involved relatively simple tasks such as making sure the credits are properly displayed, ensuring the end menu is properly lined up and displayed and updating the help menu with actually useful information. These are all small things comparatively, but a game is only ever as good as its parts. Therefore, I want to make sure that all the pieces of the puzzle are as good as they can be.
All of this means that the demo is indeed done. I uploaded it to Steam, and it will be released in time for Steam Next Fest.
I also spent an evening working on The Story Of E. Rose. I added an epilogue after one of the endings, and made some improvements on the backend regarding the sound effects to make sure the button clicks don't get cut off too fast. In total there are now 10 endings to the game, as I added four more through the epilogue, in which you play as a crew member of another ship, centuries in the future which is sent to investigate the Scylla.
That is all for this Dev Diary, more to come in two weeks.
-Olav