Dev Diary 5: A New Year

Currently, the status of Lab 77 is as follows:

• 51 of 54 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining 10, five are pending further testing and five have yet to be resolved.

• Major level design overhaul has been completed, QA pending

• Music, sound design, scripting and voice acting work is all in progress.

Since last time, Lab 77 has undergone a major update. After some feedback from playtesting I saw that a major level design overhaul was needed. This meant re-doing 66 of the 77 levels, and introducing three new level design elements: the “death” block, teleportation block and conveyor block.

The “death” block does what it says on the tin, or almost. On easy and medium difficulty the player is reset to the last floor they touched. On hard the level is fully reset.

The teleportation block(s) are also self explanatory, they teleport the player. One block teleports you above the target block, one below, one left and one right.

The conveyor block also does what you’d think. It pushes the player along, going either left or right. Getting this to work turned out to be more annoying than I thought, largely thanks to Unity physics being annoying and me getting a headache whenever I have to do work with physics.

All of these changes now require a renewed effort of QA and playtesting. And more artwork. I am also somewhat concerned that having made these changes I have possibly gone too far afield from the core of the game, the only enemy being yourself, the player. But this will have to be tested.

Other than this work I allowed myself a moment of serenity and rest after a hectic 2023. And as usual, if you want to see more behind the scenes you can subscribe to our Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/DistilledProductionsLimited).

I am hoping 2024 will be an interesting and good year for me and Distilled Productions Limited, especially with the launch of Lab 77 hopefully happening this year.

That is all for this dev diary. With normal service resuming, the next update will likely be in two weeks.

Thank you for reading

- Olav