Dev Diary 36: Small Tasks, Wwise & A Rabbit Hole
Currently, the state of Lab 77 is as follows:
197 of 200 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining three bugs, two require further testing and one requires more work.
Music and sound design implementations are being worked on.
First of all, Lab 77 has reached 200 recorded bugs. I think this is some form of milestone? Anyways...
After the previous dev diary was released I decided to start off the past two weeks with some quality assurance and bug fixing. I managed to resolve some of the smaller bugs such as implementing the laser in the tutorial rather quickly, which was a nice way to start off. I also did a minor bit of code-refactoring by improving the scratch implementation I had made for Wwise the previous Friday. This refactoring will probably never be seen or noticed, but I was too ashamed of my initial implementation to let it stay the way it was. Additionally, I continued with the trailer, making a 2nd draft that I shared on Patreon and the connected Discord for feedback.
Next I made a small improvement to the main menu. I decided to explain the difference in death resets in the difficulty selection menu, which I really should have done for the demo. In all honesty this is something that I had put on my to-do list quite a while ago, but due to my eternal issues with Unity UI I was quite worried that I would run into issues even when I was just updating some text. Thankfully, I was able to make the edit without any issues. This is how little faith I have in Unity by now, being worried about making text edits and breaking everything.
Moving on, I continued working on the Wwise integration with Rossano. As mentioned last time, we had managed to get the basic implementation working with some levels of wrangling, but when we left it off it was in a stable state. Thankfully we were able to make a lot of progress in implementing the variance of the music, sound effects, voice over and more. We were able to validate that the basics were working after Rossano had made some changes to transition between the tracks faster and with this we added the variance based on number of placements in a level. Additionally, we implemented the volume control which I was somewhat dreading as it again meant a return to Unity UI fun. However, for a second time the changes worked and the volume control was re-established. Additionally, I realised I had to make larger UI changes to allow for separate volume controls for the voice over, which I don't look forward to. I know I should have set this up previously, but that would have been too easy.
In addition to working on Wwise I spent some time playtesting again. Having deleted two data sets out of carelessness before I finally sat down to gather a new data set from the newest version of the game, which also included some of the Wwise implementation. However, within five minutes of playing I realised there was a significant issue with the movement sound effects which made the game largely unplayable as the audio engine began lagging due to too much sound being played. The main issue was that I did not have enough stops of the looping movement sound effect, which I noticed by pressing pause, returning to the main menu and still hearing the movement sound.
This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole in realising this issue was not just with the proper levels, but also with the tutorial, at which point a decision I had made over a year ago in how the tutorial is managed came back to haunt me. Basically, as the tutorial is not counted as a "proper" level, it does not have a pause menu (this is also affected by the way the notes display works, but that's a story for another day). Because of this, the movement sounds would continue in the main menu after leaving the tutorial unfinished. And I was not able to make my slightly hacky solution for the proper levels work, which prompted me to implement a better solution that caught all the variances of this bug by having all sound effects governed by the game manager, an object I have set in DontDestroyOnLoad and which, as the name suggests, manages the game. With this, the sound effects bug was resolved.
Going forwards these are the key remaining objectives:
Finish the Wwise implementation, this involves the required UI changes.
Subtitles. This is again more UI stuff, but deserves its own point because there is a high chance this goes very wrong.
Gather the data for placements per level.
QA: Make sure the final version works, there are no outstanding bugs and make sure hard mode is completable.
Finish and release the trailer
Release the game
With each item that gets ticked off this list, the game gets closer to its full release and I get closer to completing my first proper indie game. I think that is just about starting to actually settle into my mind.
Anyways, that is all for this Dev Diary. Thank you for reading and there is more to come in two weeks.
-Olav