Dev Diary 26

Currently, the state of Lab 77 is as follows

• 149 of 157 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

I have finally had a chance to do more proper playtesting. And of course this means that I have found more bugs. Ergo, my work over the last two weeks has largely centered around fixing bugs and generally making improvements to the playing experience. Quite a few of the bugs came from the implementation of the new backgrounds, with some misalignments, parallax issues and other small mistakes that were relatively easily rectified, but as there were a few of them it was rather time consuming.

I also had some other feedback on some elements of the demo. Some of these changes were further UI changes which it was very useful to have feedback on. For instance rewording the popup about reading the note to say that it can only be read after the chamber is completed. Additionally, I revisited the main menu and did some fixing of the alignment of the settings menu and I made some changes to the difficulty selection menu.

Playtesting can often be the most tedious part of game development. In fact it would not surprise me if I have played certain levels 100 times just because I have repeatedly made small changes that needed to be tested. Though, the more you playtest your game and the more quality assurance you go through the closer you get to the finished product. Now that I have less items remaining on the to-do list as well, there is more and more need for quality assurance to make sure everything is as good as it can be.

Going forward my intention is to start implementing some of the voice over work that has been recorded. I will also be testing more of course while the remining artwork and music is being worked on. Once that is done I will implement it, and then make sure there are steam achievements and possibly other things I can think of implementing.

That is all for now, more to come in two weeks

-Olav