Tag: dev

Heading to Rezzed in 1 week

March 25, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

Since I’ve got a build done for Indiecade, pressure is off a bit for Rezzed, as even if the game dies often, I’ll be there to restart it etc. My biggest fear is I’ll be overseas without my PC and unable to fix any issues that occur. I’m most concerned that there could be some kind of graphics card incompatibility or some other thing that causes the game to run badly or fail, but I’ve tested the game on a number of friends computers with no issues so far.

I took Monday and half of Tuesday off to recover from working most of the weekend into an all-nighter. Now:

Final Rezzed Tasks

Monday

Ensure my build shortcuts work so we can just load planets from wherever we are. ~30 mins
Fine tune camera some more ~30 mins
Script energy spheres so they’re closer to the ground for new players to pick up more easily. Couldn’t get a handle on what my dumb code was doing, gonna bail on this for now at least ~30mins
Try to get level restarting working again ~3 hrs :(
- I wasn’t looking close enough at my debug logs ordering or my if else logic!
Improve timing on navigation icon hint animation ~15 mins

Tuesday

More camera fine tuning ~30 mins
Improve planet 2 ~4 hours
Hanging out probably a bit too much on William Chyr’s excellent Manifold Garden stream :P Highly recommended occasionally though, especially if you’re a solo dev. ~2 hrs

Wednesday

New creature stuff for 2nd planet ~ 3 hrs
Integration with MapMagic ~30 mins
Directional vector UI stuff ~2 hrs
Bug fixing above! ~30 mins

Thursday

Further creature improvements ~1hr
Profiling above. Oops it runs like hell :/ ~30 mins
Improving planet 2 biomes, variation. ~2 hrs
Testing ~30 mins
Rezzed prep work ~1 hr
Build testing/uploading ~30 mins

Friday

Not really going to add anything of substance from here on, it’s Friday, I’m leaving Monday for 1 1/2 weeks, so I’m going to make sure it works properly then pack tomorrow and chill out before the hell that is international flying on Monday.

Air particlezzz! I’m embarrassed to say ~3 hrs (it’s hard to get these just right!)
Tweaking both planets ~3hrs
Tweaking lighting ~1 hr
Rezzed prep ~30 mins

Saturday

Final testing has picked up a bug with the wormhole sequence where the screen goes black (but game continues afterward). So this will be my last task before flying off. If anyone going to Rezzed is reading this, I’ll cya there, hopefully without a buggy game on my hands!

Rezzed Goals, PR/Marketing, Story

February 17, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

I’m going to work towards making this blog more interesting for people to read, which means:

a) less updates (some days not much happens, or boring things!)

b) more in each post, with the fluff cut out. Or, all the same fluff in, but perhaps I’ll reduce the text/bullet size or make it expandable if you care.

c) more time spent editing/crafting less posts = a better read.

I’ll therefore edit this post as I go from Monday morning and it’ll come out near the end of the week.

Pre-Rezzed Goalz

My terrible stand-in voice to be replaced with a voice actor’s (2-3 days of back and forths perhaps)
Some story/narrative tweaks (2-3 days). Will see if I can get any ‘quick wins’. Story will most likely change more after Rezzed so I’m not going to go crazy with this now.
Improve tutorial level somewhat. Probably greatly increase its size so it more closely matches the planets (right now it’s one small room). Add a skip tutorial button, incase people wanna get on with it. 3-4 days.
Finish Planet 2. 4-5 days.
Planet 1 to Planet 2 transition (wormhole). 3-4 days.
Sort out what I’ll be doing for PR for Rezzed Leftfield. Shouldn’t be a huge amount of my time… 1-2 days?
Final testing. 2-3 days.

This all comes out to about 4-5 weeks. Rezzed is in 9 weeks, which lets me do the classic doubling of my time estimates ‘because game development’. The weakest point of the game (my voice over) will be brought wayyy up, and the second planet introduced, which are the two main things. If I get the rest done, that’s a bonus.

This week’s EXO ONE Goalz

I’ve been lining up meetings with some PR people/companies and will be chatting with them this/next week.
I’ve also seen a couple of publishers who I think might be a good fit. However, I’m not totally sold on the concept of having one, but I think I need to chat with them and see if they can change my mind. So I’ll try and line up chats with them.
Since I’ll be working with a voice actor, I’ll work first on the story/lines of dialog (2 days) before handing those over. Then, while I wait to get the audio back (and maybe revisions) I can carry on with:
Planet 1 to 2 transition. Since I’d be happy-ish showing Planet 2 in its current state, I’ll first make sure the planet 1 to 2 wormhole works. That might take me the rest of the week, interspersed with the above + pr related stuff. If I get it done quickly, then I improve Planet 2.

Mid Week Progress

Talking Rezzed

I haven’t been super productive with a whole lot of uncertainty surrounding if/how I’ll be going to Rezzed. I’ve ended up contacting not only a couple of existing contacts in the UK, but also PR and other people who have been to Rezzed in the past, to try and get their thoughts. A sampling of advice I’ve received and things I’ve learned:

Don’t go to events if it’s a huge chunk of your budget, but
It’s super important for building relationships with press, developers and publishers.
You’ll never make a return on investment by going to events.
There’s far less chance your game will be covered if you aren’t there and you aren’t lining up meetings.
Press probably won’t talk or meet with you if you haven’t built relationships with them already.
You can just pull in press who walk by!
OMG PR is so expensive.
PR was totally worth it
PR did nothing for us
Advice is super conflicting :)

EXO ONE Story

In between emailing people, I’ve been looking at the story and trying not to rewrite it ‘completely’ and just tweak some stuff. I’m not a super experienced writer, and I have a good idea what kinda story I want, but feel a bit of a gap between where the story is and where I want it to be. I’ve gone two days over schedule already working on this, so I definitely have to move on tomorrow.

I’ve had some interesting new ideas, which is good. Also tightened up and fixed a bunch of stuff which was far more obvious after having time away.

End of Week Wrap

Well, this week was unfortunately not among my most productive. Again as I’m not a writer, I wonder how normal it is to spend long amounts of time just in thought, not actively doing much, just thinking/trying to come up with stuff. The story for EXO ONE is highly restrictive in some ways but unlimited in others, and I find it hard to reach good solutions for certain problems. Having said that, I feel like I’ve just come up with some decent stuff this Friday afternoon. A re-read tomorrow/Monday will determine if I still like it, though.

Didn’t even start on the wormhole/planet transition stuff as I’m still not quite happy with the story. If I like it on Monday, I’ll polish it a little more and send it to my voice actor, then move onto wormholes for realz!

Have a good weekend!

Daily Dev Log. Social Media Optimizing, Debugging Jumping

January 17, 2017 / Jay / 1 Comment

17 Jan 2017

Planned Task List

Answer a couple of Hyperfocal (my bread ‘n butter biz) emails. ~30 mins
Do a little Facebook ad research ~15 mins
Write an intro email to an Aussie games journalist ~10 mins
Build EXO ONE and check it actually works (was testing in-editor) ~10 mins
Take deep breath and try to fix the jumping problem for the 10th time. Jumping was never an issue until I rewrote some code to make things clearer/better. Surprise I made it a little worse at the same time! This could take all day, but I might admit defeat at the 2-3 hour mark (because Rezzed Left Field games event deadline) and move on to other tasks like yesterdays:
When reaching the end transport monolith, some tidying up needed for sounds etc.
Add escape/Start menu so players can restart the game
Numerous small things like HUD appearing when it shouldn’t, old text that makes no sense in intro, etc.

Realtime Notes:

Stuff that comes up as I go:

Facebook Ads Research

My Facebook ads research: https://www.quicksprout.com/2017/01/16/15-advanced-facebook-advertising-techniques-that-you-probably-didnt-know-about/

Social Media Post Timing
I always thought posting social media at 9am was the optimum time. Just saw this, though, which is kinda arguing against that. This is for facebook, but possibly applies to other social media:

Pages to Watch
See how often other developers post on Facebook and their level of engagement using “Pages to Watch”. Pages > Insights > scroll down. Requires 100 followers. Ugh, I have 70 something. Going to just buy 30 so I can mess with this.

Video is huge on Facebook
I’ve definitely noticed this last year, and need to start uploading videos there instead of just posting links to Youtube.

I thought those 3 were the best points, but check out the article yourself.

Email

Contacted a local journalist (something I do way too infrequently) to see if he was keen to check out the game. I always ‘feel the fear’ of contacting people, mostly because it involves putting yourself and your game out there to be potentially ignored. But that is life or something! In the email was the ‘elevator pitch’:

“EXO ONE is an exo-planetary exploration game where you float, fly, roll and glide with complete freedom across a multitude of surreal, alien worlds.”

Thoughts?

Testing Build

Building and checking that it works first of all… Here’s some notes I took:

Quotes ” ” in tutorial are all over the place, just gonna remove
Debug warning text shouldn’t be showing in tutorial, but is. Prob related to recent addition of Energy Explanation stuff
Wormhole fx don’t show in tutorial
Jump bug almost seems to be happening more than usual :/
No wind buffeting sound in clouds, probably due to tweaking sound levels yesterday.

The sound and music levels are a little off still, but I sense a huge time-sink ahead if I start moving sliders. Slider moving is truly my bane. Maybe if I have time I’ll return to this. Now, jump buuuug!

Took 20 mins.

Jump Bug

Kicking this off at 1130am with some Hyper Light Drifter music by DisasterPeace :)

Playing in-editor to watch when jump count debugs fire off, to try and get an idea what causes one jump to work and not another. It feels like an issue with FixedUpdate, but the way I handle the jump controls, it should only fire for one frame. Removed a line of hacky looking code and tested again, seems to be working. But I’ve thought I’d fixed it before! Will carry on testing it as I do other things. Took 10 mins.

Related to jumping, the visual effect for jumping in glide mode is broken, so working on that now.

Glider to Jump Transformation

Only I could make something as simple as a ball transforming into a flattened ball so hard! Really keen to get a programmer’s eyes on this to get their opinion on my logic/methodology. A friend of mine has offered, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what he thinks.

I think my logic skills are just so bad that I have trouble visualising how to handle all the cases of ball transformation, from sphere to glider, to jumping sphere, jumping glider and back… Typically when I’m stuck like this I just kinda start trying thingz and seeing what the result is. Probably hence how slow I am!

I just adjusted script execution order to hopefully clean up conflicting timings… I think this is probably a bad solution, but surprisingly that fixed it! The reason I tried this, was that in my code ‘tidy up’ prior to holidays, I split the player code out into 3 scripts, and now a few things happen “at the same time(?)” in Update(), whoops. In the future, if doing this, I probably need to do less bools and more calling of functions in the separate scripts, instead of in Update(), using bools to trigger when stuff happens. If that makes any sense…?

30 mins

End of Planet/Level Tidying

Mostly I need to just properly end the ‘demo’ if it’s shown at Rezzed. When you reach the transport monolith and fire into the sky, some sounds go stupid and I need to stop that. I’ll also bring up text with ‘demo over’ and then a menu with Restart Game and Restart Level. Come to think of it, since I should add this for testers and for the Rezzed build in general, in case something breaks, maybe I should make a ‘proper’ little menu screen with these two options that’s available at any time using Start/Esc. Unsure how long this might take, should just need to call my level changing code and make the menu/options/on/off etc… I’m going to wildly guess 1 hour. 12:17pm

So far so good, have a menu in my ManagerScene I can turn on and off with Esc/Start button, displaying the two buttons, but can’t seem to make a click happen. Hopefully there isn’t some dumb code blocking rays somehow…

Ah, nice, found this: https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/cant-click-ui-buttons.431042/ which explained how to use the EventSystem to check what rays are hitting. Nailed this in 2 seconds and restart level is working with a couple nul refs, which don’t seem to be hurting anything too much…!

Kinda happy with how my LoadEXOScene(string levelname) works, as I was able to easily reuse it for the menu level loading/reloading. Added something so Esc can’t be hit in the start menu (level can’t be restart from the start of the game!), and testing now in a build.

A few things,

No mouse appearing on esc/menu in build, due to 3rd person camera plugin hiding it
There’s an errant escape Input somewhere that’s still quitting when I hit esc/start.
Narration continues while paused (leave this for now, doesn’t matter)
Need an Exit button for testers/in case the game bugs out and people wanna completely close and restart the game.
Need an Exit menu item on start screen + actual game exit code
Realised I need a better RestartLevel() because there’s 2 levels (I was cheating and just loading the first planet).

Time: 1:25pm, looks like I might need another half an hour, so might take twice as long as my hail mary guess.

Having a break, now that I’ve completed a few of the above. 1:50

Break O’Clock

Back at 230 with sweet caffeination after dropping in at William Chyr’s Manifold Garden stream.

Finalising Menus/Exiting

Just realised since my Start Screen scene is separate from my Manager Scene, I can’t just drop in my GameManager script to OnClick to Quit, which is annoying. I guess I should maybe move all of this into the Manager scene, but not right now! Added some duplicate Application.Quit code :P

Things taking slightly longer here as I’m trying to test Editor/Build specific stuff like Quit and mouse pointer lockstates, which for some reason seems different in editor vs build.

I’m getting very tempted to move PlayerControls into the Manager Scene, as I now need to ‘re-write’ some more stuff to handle hitting escape when the player isn’t in a scene, ugh. Will need refactoring though… Must… not… do…! OK, no quitting allowed during the intro for now! Boom!

This is turning into an even larger task, lots of stuff I didn’t realise I’d need. Here’s the remaining tasks for restart/reset:

After restart level and restart game,
Menu remains
Game stays paused
Other UI remains.
Need to probably eventually make a state for this?
For some reason mouse pointer doesn’t appear when hitting esc in tutorial scene but does in first planet.
While testing in tutorial, noticed some more broken text/prompt stuff, eep!

3pm now. Might take another hour for this, if I was to double what I actually think it’ll take!

Added Resume() which is called after level restart, and a resume button, so those things now work. On to Restart now.

Wrote a new Restart() function similar to my LoadEXOScene() one. Task now blown out to most of the day :/ 4PM

Getting close now, fixed all the above and Restart() is working with only one problem, music continues after restart.

Boom, done!

Check out this amazing menu (lol):

Certainly good enough to go, IMO!

Lightning

I was having issues with getting lightning visually depicting how much charge a player had, which led me to email the plugin developer for this procedural lightning. I’ve got a response so I’m going to try his tweaks to see what they’re like, so I can respond before end-of-day. I kinda try and prioritize stuff like this when most developers are in a different time zone, I don’t wanna wait too long between emails. Committing first, though! 430PM

Broke to make food… Now 530. About an hour then I’m done.

Updated lightning plugin as the author’s changes didn’t work, suspect this is the reason. Still getting errors, so emailed the author back and moving on.

Other Tasks

In order of importance that I can complete in 45 mins or so:

Tidying sound etc for level ending
Wormhole FX in tutorial isn’t turning on
Wind buffeting sound in clouds is gone for some reason
Player starting position is crap, we start rolling backward toward the camera. Starting on a hill would be best.

For now I’m just muting sound when you touch the monolith and fading to black, completed in 5-10 mins. Buttons don’t look great on black though… And the pointer is invisible… Fixed, 5 more mins…

Ugh, now for some reason my Restart code isn’t working! Perhaps because it’s about 40C in my office right now! Ok phew, it was just because I changed the file/folder names for some scene files…! My rage levels have risen the temp even farther now and it’s dinner time.

DEV COMPLETE. 6PM.

This is working out fairly well. Either I’m getting more done, or am more focused or I just remember now what I’ve done, either way quite liking this! I wonder how boring and incomprehensible it is to read, though? :)