Dev Diary 3
Currently, the status of Lab 77 is as follows:
22 of 23 bugs have been squashed, the last one requires more testing of all levels.
New artwork of S539-77 has come in and been integrated. This artwork has solved the clipping issues mentioned in the previous dev diary. Additionally the movement animations have been refined.
Collectible lab notes have been written and are awaiting integration
Music, sound design, scripting and voice acting work is all in progress.
The past two weeks of work focused mainly on the integration of the new artwork and animations. This was not as smooth a process as I had hoped it would be due to not initially thinking through what I should do and issues with the Unit editor itself. The first issue with a lack of planning shone through in what I initially thought was an issue with the engine itself in that it seemed to me that the animation were very slow in changing, and that they had certain instances where it seemed the animation were not changing at all:
However, I eventually realised that the issues illustrated in the above video were not with the engine but were instead with my own lack of thinking. It turned out that as the animation changes were designed on the change of velocity of the main character, I had omitted to give it a condition for what to do when falling. Having realised this I made the appropriate changes which resulted in a much better looking set of animations:
As I mentioned I also had issues with the engine itself. Specifically, I had issues with the inspector and the fact that initially the settings dropdown is closed (which is a major issue with Unity in general, I have a hard time understanding why these dropdown in the inspector default to closed). Additionally, when you create animation transitions in unity they have a delay by standard, which I didn't know. This, I also do not understand any reasoning for but it is what it is.
In between working on the animations I have been working on writing 77 individual lab notes. These are intended to be collectables in the levels and will be used to describe the world of Lab 77. In the next few weeks I'll work on integrating these and making a way to display the collected ones.
I am also continuously working on the business side of things, but that is not overly interesting and largely involves admin work.
That is all for this dev diary. Next update will likely be in two weeks.
Thank you for reading
- Olav