Dev Diary 2 & Some More General Updates

Currently, the status of Lab 77 is as follows:

• 19 of 21 bugs have been squashed, the remaining two are still the quality assurance phase as they are quite comprehensive and somewhat difficult to test. Unfortunately, one of them also seems to be a bit temperamental and thus hard to reproduce.

• As was shown in this post (https://twitter.com/D1st1ll3dPr0d/status/1722655810545754132) the new artwork has begun to come in and the animations are in development. Through implementation of the sprites some sizing and clipping issues were discovered and they are being addressed.

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

Additionally, I have recently been investigating a few other project ideas. These ideas are still in the earliest of stages and as such I would not want to say too much yet. What I can say with certainty though is that as Lab 77 is going to be the first and last game developed in the Unity Game Engine by Distilled Productions Limited. Although I do like the workflow, I can not stand by their recent business decisions. As such I will be spending more time this year looking into other engines such as Godot or Flax for the next projects, and I hope to be able to share more about these some time in 2024. Though starting out in either of these engines will be a learning process I sincerely hope that making the change will be a long-term benefit.

As I mentioned last week I had the chance to attend Games Talks Live in Edinburgh on the 14th of November. I had the pleasure of talking to several people there as well as listening to some interesting talks from industry professionals. This was also the last event of the year and now I will be able to fully focus on the development of Lab 77, outside problems such as a broken boiler not withstanding of course.

Lastly, we now have a Patreon page set up (https://www.patreon.com/DistilledProductionsLimited). Currently, there are two tiers you can join, the Supporter ($2) and Special Supporter ($4) tiers. Subscribing to either of these tiers will give you access to an exclusive community discord server, and the Special Supporter tier will give you access to special sneak peaks at the work being done on any projects. I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to anyone who signs up as your support will allow me to keep Distilled Productions Limited going.

That is all for this dev diary. Next update will likely be in two weeks.

Thank you for reading

- Olav