Dev Diary 7

Currently the status of Lab 77 is as follows:

• 74 of 86 bugs have been dealt with. Of the remaining 12, three require further work and 9 require further testing to determine whether the implemented fixes have worked.

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

In the time since the last dev diary I have been quite busy. Mostly my time has been spent dealing with the bugs I discovered through my playtesting session mentioned last time. As such I have not added many new features, the only two being a jump state indicator which is accessible through the accessibility menu and I have added particle systems to the player character.

The jump state indicator was suggested to me during the playtesting session. I attempted to have this be indicated by changing either the alpha or the colour of the player character, but neither yielded sufficient results. Therefore I landed on having two green pips appear under the character, one per jump. Through further testing I received mixed feedback on the necessity of these indicators, which is why I added them as an accessibility setting.

In addition to the jump state indicator I also added some particle systems to the player character. I added a spawn particle burst, single jump particle burst and double jump particle burst:

Adding these bursts meant another interaction with a poorly designed Unity editor UI element. To someone who has never worked with the particle system component in the Unity Engine, the first thing you see being a list of about 20 checkboxes that double as dropdown menus is not ideal. However, after some amount of googling, asking for advice and clicking random buttons I was able to produce the bursts seen in the above GIF which I am quite happy with.

That is all for this dev diary, more to come in two weeks.

Thank you for reading.

- Olav