Tag: log

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 EXO ONE Dev Log. Controller Menu Support, Final Rezzed Version

January 19, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

It’s the 19th in Australia, and the deadline is the 20th in the UK, so I have kinda 1 1/2 days to go. Need the controller support 100%, so that’s number one priority!

My fall-back if I fail this will be “mouse and kb only”!

Task Planning:

Controller menu support: N hours? Never done this so no idea.
Not even going to add yesterday’s minor tasks
Testing with controller and mouse/kb 1 hour

Dear Google, “unity navigating UI controller rewired”

Found a few links, looks like the event system is what I’m dealing with:

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/883220/how-to-change-selected-button-in-eventsystem-or-de.html

Since I’m using Rewired there’s a bit I’ve found that looks like I need to setup some actions for UI:

http://guavaman.com/projects/rewired/docs/RewiredStandaloneInputModule.html

Yikes, just started and realised I also need to control drop down menus. I have a bad feeling :) AND! I still have some terrible dual Event Systems happening (one in each scene). After this I’m going to have to do some serious tidying. I barely know what an event system is so yeah… bad feeling!

Rewired Event Systemz

Looks like I need to:

Setup Rewired Input Manager and Event System
Add new controller actions for UI and maybe a new controller map/category

Ok so I’ve set it all up and I’m pushing controller sticks and d-pads but nothing happening. Kinda dunno if we can even control UIs in another scene or not… I have Rewired in the Manager Scene and the UI to control in the IntroScene. Reading more!

Seems if I click a button then move the controller stick I can use it, think I just need to set a menu option as active to start with, which is annoying as it’s in a different scene!

Moved some stuff into the Manager scene so it’s easier to reference, now we start with the NEW GAME button selected, and can select menu options but not Action any buttons. 1 hr so far.

Action button working (typo!) as well as drop-down menus, amazingly. Refactoring a bunch of stuff now that scripts and objects were moved around. Getting there! 30 mins

While testing this, I realised that if the game will be in a noisy hall and/or someone isn’t wearing headphones or doesn’t wanna listen to the story, they’ll think the long intro is a bug, or boring or whatever. Anyway, adding a button to skip the intro narration! Functionality already exists for debugging so… 5 mins.

Ack! Gross code! Again I need PlayerControls in my manager scene, but really can’t right now, no time! Maybe I can whack something into the Event System to handle this for now, nfi!

Trying to just ‘whack in’ PlayerControls in the intro scene but bad things are happening. Functionality already exists 5 mins ehhhh? Whoops again! 30 mins later and I’ve mostly got this working using some if(introStarted) and if(gameLevelStarted) in PlayerControls. All works, except if I hit New Game, and the intro starts, with the mouse it’s fine, but the controller seems to ‘double click’ or something, causing us to insta skip the intro. Can’t see anything in Rewired to cause a button press to be down longer or anything, might fudge a delay into introStarted for now. Done, 5 mins.

Ok, main menu just needs the drop down items to be red when selected and we are done. Boom!

Rewired for In-Game Menu

I think the main thing for this will just be that I have to tell the EventSystem to select Resume every time I hit Esc/Start, so we can cycle through menu options. I’ll cross my fingers anyway. Here’s what Rewired says to do:

void SetSelected(GameObject selectableObject)

{

// Set the currently selected GameObject

EventSystem.current.SetSelectedGameObject(selectableObject);

}

I think I can just grab

EventSystem.current.SetSelectedGameObject(selectableObject);
and force it to always be Resume? This isn’t a complex menu or anything…

As usual, and probably because my code is a terrible mess, to cut a long story short, there’s lots of broken things happening. The starting menu appears in the tutorial/planet scenes, somehow the ingame menu is appearing in the Intro screen on restart and more! It’s 130 so taking a lunch break.

Lunch

2pm restart. Wondering if I should be trying harder to write good code right now instead of panic rushing stuff. Have a feeling I’ll be working a couple of late nights…

40 minutes in and things are a little cleaner, but still these problems:

Restarting doesn’t turn the Quality/Res/NewGame Canvas back on
- If I manually turn it on and try and press New Game there’s a bunch of null refs from unrelated stuff.
~~When we restart, we can hit escape and the in-game menu appears…~~ 10 mins

Slowly moving everything into sane places in my code, mostly in SceneSetup and LoadEXOScene places instead of just blammed in dumb places with similar function names in an attempt to confuse myself as much as possible.

CofffeeeeeeEeEeeeee! 10 mins

Ok things are looking good! The restart() loop is working fine now except the narration isn’t restarting properly.

My First OnDisable() Ever

I swear, first time I’ve ever done one… to try and handle resetting vars for Restart(). #unitytips4pros

Seriously the fact I’ve never used this is so ridic!

Shortly followed by me writing this comment to myself in my code: //we never disable this script YOUUUUUU!!!

My Dumbest OnDisable() Ever

void LoadTutorialLevel()
{
OnDisable(); //weeeeeeeee!
GameManager.instance.LoadEXOScene(“LoopFacility”);
}

Yeah, I’ll rename this, lol, maybe “ResetVars()”. I’m just being stupid. 45 mins later we can restart and still hear my amazing, self-voiced Aussie-accented narration!

Now the question is, can I restart from ANYWHERE. Testing!

Testing!

An asteroid annoyingly blocks the monoliths blue beam, it’s distracting! Fixed 2 mins
Restart works like a treat except once we’ve completed the game/demo, the narrator (and all sound) isn’t restarting.

Watch me Learn!

After we fire the player off at the end of the demo, I mute everything, so…

void OnDisable()
{
MasterAudio.UnmuteEverything();
}

Boom! Task complete dare I say? Now building and testing with mouse/kb and controller.

Test Build Notes

4pm

In the build, the dropdowns for Quality and Res are switched around, and resolution was 1180 or something… uh oh! Fixed in 30 mins
Ok now it looks fine but I can’t use the interface at all… Can’t change drop downs without them ‘staying’ and obscuring other interface, and New Game doesn’t work at all either. Fixed in 30 mins
Even while debug says I’m changing quality settings, the game is definitely just using some middling quality setting. Who knows when the last time was that worked… Anyway fixed in-editor, Fixed 15 mins
Getting hit by lightning in tutorial, lawl… This fixed itself??
In the build, we can see menu options but instead of the intro/earth scene in the background it’s pure black. But in editor it’s fine……….!!!!!!!! NFI why the differences. OK maybe being hasty, it’s because in editor I have both scenes open already, so testing with just Manager scene loading first… Fixed 30ish mins.
Narration pauses too long in intro, players might skip in 2 seconds Fixed 2 mins
If I leave the intro to complete, I get a bunch of rewired errors – check to see the difference between skipping intro (which I’ve been doing endlessly) and letting it run
- Odd, further testing didn’t replicate the bug… Fixed

Second Round of Testing Notes

Just played through with the controller, striking out stuff that’s too hard basket/not critical:

~~Low player/environ vol in tutorial~~
~~Voice intro dull sounding? Muted? “Wrong” mixer settings?~~
~~Mouse pointer stays till we use controller~~
~~Fully open tutorial door, we can hit it accidentally~~
Narrator vol is messed up if we go in clouds. Only adjust mixer if narration not happening. Fixed 5 mins
Controller > start. Resume. In game menu stays open. Fixed 10 mins
Controller > restart, lost focus on Intro Menu. Need another one of these EventSystem.current.SetSelectedGameObject(selectableObject); Fixed
After restart, skip intro, no player or environment volume in tutorial scene
Can’t see some lightning bolts hitting us, usually the first one??

Dinner O’Clock

Breaking for dinner at 630, then probably do another hour or two since I’m running out of time. Also just re-read the closing date for LeftField, seems the 20th is closed, dunno if I can submit on the day or not so…

Committed. 815pm

Now to add the EventSystem.SetSelectedObject to the main menu/new game button in case of a restart… I can’t seem to figure out why I can’t get the New Game button to start selected/highlighted on Restarts, which is unfortunate… It may be something to do with the mouse taking focus away from it, like if I ever move the mouse… However I just tried not touching anything, and that made no difference. The Rewired Event System confirms that it is actually selected/highlighted, and I can just press Action to start a New Game, so it may not be highlighting correctly or using the wrong color for some reason. Might Google this.

Found this: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1159573/eventsystemsetselectedgameobject-doesnt-highlight.html
The WaitForEndOfFrame coroutine was a winner. 15 mins.
My other worry is if someone knocks the mouse and takes focus away from the menu… I may need to have something that detects mouse or joystick usage and uses that.

For the joystick, perhaps “if selected object in the event system is null, and if any joystick axis/button down, set new game as the selected object”. Mouse doesn’t need that come to think of it.

Re-activating Menus with Controller if Focus Lost

Was pretty happy with this code, which appears to have worked first go, can now move the mouse off menus/click off menus so they deactivate, then move the d-pad and the menu will come back. Only downside is, controller axis doesn’t do that yet. Gonna try for 5 mins. Wow, things work! Here’s my amazing code, which is mostly other peoples amazing code and plugins!

930PM, going to do another Build Test.

Third Build Test Notes

Can’t select resolution with controller.
At end of demo, the mouse pointer was sat on a button, and no Controller input would budge it… Maybe “if Controller input, lock mouse cursor”? Then, if mouse movement, unlock? Same happened just in the normal in game menu but multiple buttons would get selected. I’m sure there’s a better way of doing this but for now… HACK ITTTT.

Trying to fix the lock state stuff by detecting mouse or joystick inputs, annnd it also worked pretty well:
Hmm, I think I need a wider blog theme so code it more legible!

Lightning, First Strike Sucks

And is invisible. Pretty important player’s realise quickly they can get struck so fixing… 10:15pm

First I will build, zip, upload, since this could be used now I think (still needs more testing though).

I fired off a bolt in secret at the start of the level, lol. Worked! 30 mins.

Still kinda hard to see the sphere covered in lightning too, gonna tweak that some more as well. The way this plugin works, it’s almost hard to have the settings ‘middle ground’ instead of it looking like it’s off or ONFIRELIGHTNING-APOCALYPSE.

Last Thing(?), Sound Levels

Some weird sound stuff happening, I dunno if I reset anything properly from scene to scene. I think I need to look at MasterAudios Dynamic Sound Group stuff to see if we are adding new sound groups endlessly or something…

Uh, lightning going off in tutorial again somehow? I did that hacky lightning so it’d go off only on the first planet… also for some reason I can hear wind now… This problem seems intermittent! Leaving it…

The reason we can hear rain in the intro after a restart is, we enter a cloud, hear rain, then restart, and rain isn’t turned off. I OnDisabled() the shiiiit out of it!

Again, the lightning + inclouds sounds appearing randomly in the tutorial is really bad. Gotta investigate at least 15 mins.

11PM

Added some extra things (sceneIsExterior) to try and shield lightning from going off in the tutorial… MasterAudio must also be firing InClouds to get the sound I hear as well, but nfi how it’s fired. There’s no clouds in the tutorial level! HumMmmMmmm

Oh, and the drop down for resolution…

If I can’t get this, no big deal, who has a monitor that isn’t 1920p?! Well the odds someone does for Rezzed just for my game is 0!

Abandoned! Can’t make sense of the code I copy pasted ages ago!

Final Test

Seems to work, ran 2 full games with mouse/kb and 2 with controller, no problems.

Did one more and still feel like sometimes the sphere doesn’t transform into a glider when entering a cloud with 0 charge with glide button held…! Noticed that it costs more to glide than we can recharge, which might have been the reason? But it only seemed a problem on first cloud enter… Tested a little more, still unsure, good enough though – you often get hit by lightning in clouds anyway I guess(!).

Tidying start position so we definitely roll down the hill the right way… And there’s a bit of geometry you can snag on the tutorial.

Zipping and submitting now and calling it a night once that’s done. Now past midnight!

Phewwwf. Maybe I’ll submit then get up at 9-10, do some more tests just to make sure, and I can submit another updated one if I need to.

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? :)

New Daily Dev Log Terror

January 16, 2017 / Jay / Comments Off

I’m going to try writing a daily log, starting today, outlining development on EXO ONE. Part of the reason I’m doing this is to keep myself honest. Did I spend all day tweaking some minor thing to perfection, or did I get a lot done? Was it important or not? Airing this out will hopefully keep me from spending time on inconsequential things, or overly optimizing/perfecting things.

Hopefully, it will also encourage me, and let me look back at what I did during the week, as it’s so easy to look at the game on week 1 and week 2 and think I’ve ‘done nothing’.

I’m unsure how often I’ll include these in the newsletter, perhaps I can do a wrap up every week or month. Let me know what you think.

16-Jan-2017

Task List/Planning

I’m submitting EXO ONE to Rezzed “Left Field”, which is a London games event with an indie component. The due date is the 20th of Jan (I perhaps shouldn’t have had such a long holiday!), so I did a playthrough to identify what was working and what was broken.

I identified some tasks in order of importance, stuff that needed to be completed or fixed before submission:

Controller support really outdated with lots of incorrect tutorial text etc. Game would probably use controller at Rezzed.
Sometimes a monolith materialises out of thin air in front of the player at the start
Outline in the tutorial how new power/energy/charge (hummm, name?) system works
Restrict how much energy the player can gain on a single planet
When reaching the end transport monolith, some tidying up needed for sounds etc.
Add escape/Start menu so players can restart the game
If I have time, a variety of other minor gameplay, visual and audio fixes

I should be able to get the controller support and tutorial stuff fixed up pretty easily (bolded above). The monolith bug however, I recall was a bit tricky, so will see how I go with that.

Development as it happens

I’ll keep notes and type as I go, bringing up things that appear, or were particularly tricky, or if I ‘fell off the wagon’ and started doing inconsequential things.

The XBox controller layout is somewhat trickier than mouse/keyboard to handle, now that I have the new pull-up functionality. I’m going to spend a little time trying different configs, because if the game doesn’t handle well it’ll have little chance of being picked for Rezzed, or enjoyed by players! Took 30 minutes.
While testing the glide/pull up controls for the tutorial, I realised that at low speed the glider barely rises at all. Adding a minimum up-force. Took 15 minutes.
Realised that in the tutorial scene, you could accidentally trigger the wormhole/next planet text by going too fast in the wrong area. Took 5 minutes.
While testing tutorial, noticed that brakes apply too easily when accidentally pulling back on the left stick by even a hair. Took 2 mins.
Sphere bounces heavily along large polygons in tutorial facility, adjusted position smoothing. 5 mins. Somewhat fixed but still notice it quite a bit. This could be too big a task to tackle now.
Now moving on to adding new energy tutorial text/functionality. For now I’ll just ask players to fully charge then drain EXO ONE before proceeding. 45 minutes.
Moving onto monolith appearing bug at 320pm. Quick win here as I realised the problem was just a dodgy bit of logic. 10 mins! However there were other issues related to timing and placement that took another 30 minutes.
The narration is confusing now that there are kinda two different types of monolith. To keep things simple I’m only going to point to the end transport monolith with the HUD. 10 mins.
When collecting energy, realised the text feedback was from an older version. 15mins.
Noticed pulling up in glide mode could let you get ridiculously high… Kinda hard to get good results messing with numbers without a good glider simulation! 30 mins.
Noticed it was almost impossible to hear the narration over other sounds sometimes, checking audio “ducking”. I recall this required a Master Audio plugin update… 430pm.
- Committing first, then making a backup of the MA plugin in case too much stuff breaks.
- Wasting a little time trying to get MA to let me duck music longer than 5 seconds, because I can’t find the var that clamps it!
- Bit of a time blowout here for sure – finally found the var then spent a little time getting ducking working/tuned.
- Total time ~1hr
Music begins incorrectly, then begins again when we reach the surface. 6pm. 2 mins.
Now I’ll stop energy from appearing once we’ve collected a few energy sources. Pretty easy, 5 mins.
Noticed monoliths can spawn on top of the end monolith, fixing. 2 mins.
Finishing up now at 630. Spent a little more time just tweaking volume levels and pull-up forces, etc.
Commit code

End of Day

Pretty happy with that. Felt like it kept me more focused. Got 3 or 4 main things done plus a bunch of other stuff that I ran into.

Tomorrow

The main thing that remains now, which I didn’t mention originally, is that jumping is currently a big problem (somehow). I’ve been spending a long time on it so far without much gain. Basically I’m using Rewired for my controls, but I’m doing something wrong somewhere, as sometimes jumps don’t happen. You press jump and get an odd visual/physics effect, rather than a standard jump force/visual.

That’ll be my nemesis task for tomorrow!