Dev Diary 4 & End Of Year Updates
Currently, the status of Lab 77 is as follows:
38 of 48 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining 10, five are pending further testing and five have yet to be resolved.
The lab notes panel has been integrated (and the source of many bugs)
QA testing has uncovered many issues to be resolved.
Music, sound design, scripting and voice acting work is all in progress.
These past two weeks have been focused on integrating the panel for reading the collected lab notes. This process has been quite difficult to get right, largely due to the horrible mixture of CSS and C# that compounds Unity UI development. Added to that was the issue of getting the TextMeshPRO text boxes to output the logs in the correct formatting. After two days of working on it I thought I had gotten it into a working state:
This was the implementation until I started toing more QA and testing on Wednesday the 13th. I went into that day with no unresolved bugs. I ended that day with 15 new unresolved bugs. A lot of these related to level design and testing, which is not a major issue and something that I would indeed rather catch now than after release. However the more acute bugs revolved around the implementation of this notes panel. Firstly, the text boxes had a constant size and did not stretch with the size of the window. Secondly, some of the notes cut off halfway through. Lastly, an index out of bounds issue that I thought I had resolved reared its ugly head again. And so I ended Wednesday being very annoyed.
Thankfully, I was able to resolve the issues wit the log panel resulting in this:
Now, I know it seems the same. But I can assure you the backend of it should now be a lot more sturdy, and the formatting of the log entries now looks a lot better. Though I still expect some work to be needed as new thigs break or old things fall apart.
Lastly, this will be the final dev diary of 2023. I will continue to do some work, but also allow myself a bit more time off to relax. 2023 has been a long, strange and interesting year for me and I hope to be able to show off more of the fruits of my labour next year.
Thank you for reading
- Olav