My main priority this week (or the first day or two) will be completing my wormhole upgrade, complete with smoother transitions and loading. With any luck it’ll just be a few hours, but I seem to have introduced some new bugs at the same time.

Then I’m back onto a bit of story related stuff, and after that I might reassess what to do next for this Rezzed build.

Monday

  • Smooth wormhole transitions ~6 hrs
  • Fixing new WH related bugs ~2 hrs

“Pro” coding tip and OMGTHX to Mr Rhys Lindsay, our EXO ONE musician:

  • If you start a coroutine from one script on another, ie “StartCoroutine(AnotherScript.instance.thing())” and then destroy your scipt/unload the scene, your coroutine will be destroyed, and you will wonder for HOURS why the helllll said coroutine fails to continue…!
  • Instead, Anotherscript.instance.StartCoroutine(OMGitWorks!());

Tuesday

Cleaning up from yesterday. Wormholes mostly working as intended now. Didn’t really get the nice super smooth transitions I wanted by loading the next level in the wormhole, but I think that is perhaps a much bigger task than I realised.

  • Wormhole clean up completed, bugs removed ~3 hrs
  • Fixing up overlays a bit when wormhole camera comes on, but still a very average solution. Think I might need some kinda ‘overlay’ camera that handles all my post processing! ~1hr
  • Fixed random sound loss on first planet ~30 mins
  • Tutorial tweaks ~30 mins
  • A whole bunch of other tweaks, now that everything is working again! ~2 hrs
    • Profiling/fixing some resource hogs
    • Fixed wrong ground contact sound in tutorial
    • Added wormhole exit effects to 2nd planet
    • etc

So, happy to report game is buildable and pretty much bug free.

Wednesday

Going to profile the game a bit and see how the frame rate is, if there’s any easy wins to make it smoother. Noticed some frame hiccups near monoliths, for example…

  • Sole remaining bugs:
    • Null ref on some sounds. ~30mins
    • Somehow at some point, the ParticlePlayground (plugin) manager disappeared from the wormhole scene, which meant I couldn’t turn it back on… Took me ages to realise this! ~2hrs…!
    • Then I wrestled unsuccessfully with why, in editor, the wormhole transition looks fine, but colors break in the build… ~2hrs
    • Similar to above where the entire game start screen was broken in build but not editor… ~1hr

Sucky day!

Thursday

  • Wasted another day in town waiting for my car to be re-repaired (they didn’t fix it the first time…)
  • Now I need to hunt down why there’s issues with my build, but not the editor. Checking:
    • Player log for any errors. Went in and fixed some warnings just in case.
    • Noticed maybe we weren’t in the right quality setting… That wasn’t it.
    • Logs pointed to my scene loading stuff, realised the intro scene wasn’t loading. Put in a million debug lines.
    • Tracked it down to (I guess due to load speeds between build and editor) the wormhole scene not finishing loading in time and messing up a coroutine sequence
    • 2 hrs
  • Perhaps not overly wise (I don’t know?) I updated the camera system to reduce the amount of cliff/ground staring you can do sometimes! Still needs fine tuning but liking the result ~2hrs.

Friday

Indiecade E3 deadline is tomorrow, and I’m wondering whether to submit to that or not.

Pros:

  • Might have less competition with other submissions because it’s the earliest submission date
  • Could send it and ‘forget it’/not spend more time on event/award submissions for a while.

Cons:

  • Potentially lower my chances of being selected because I have less time to improve the game
  • Barely enough time right now to test the build

I’m going to work assuming I’ll submit for the e3 deadline, then see where I get up to and make a decision tonight/tomorrow morning.

Tasks for tonight’s deadline

  • Restarting levels/game is a bit broken. Perhaps not a massive problem, especially if I make a note to restart the exe instead, I dunno. Not a great foot to put forward… “my game is broke so don’t press THIS button”.
    • Had a huge amount of trouble getting this to work in wormholes as I was async loading the next level in the wormhole, and you can’t cancel async operations… Gave up on pause in wormhole! ~3 hrs wasted
    • Checking normal pause/restart stuff working ~1 hr
  • Perhaps minor color bug when we enter a wormhole in the tutorial. Ignoring!
  • Decide whether to fix or remove some new ‘story-like’ feature in the 2nd world (don’t want to spoil) which isn’t 100% working. Fixed this, took ages ~3 hrs
  • Fine tune new camera stuff or just use old one?
    • Had a play and had the new stuff working quite fast so sticking with new ~30 mins
  • Not obvious enough ‘objective arrow’. Use some combination of:
    • Text/blinking text (at least at start/level load, then turn off). “Energy signature”.
    • Start the arrow size large/blinking then quickly reduce size.
    • ~1 hr (still not obvious enough!)
  • Final testing
    • Picked up lots of restart level/restart game issues. Restart level I removed completely as I was stumped and had no time left. ~2 hrs
    • Numerous other tweaks to planets, UI, sound, etc, etc. ~2 hrs
    • Profiling for frame rate issues ~1 hr
    • Playing through the entire build many many times ~2 hrs.

I ended up pulling an all-nighter to get this finished before the deadline. I still had ~4 hours before the deadline, but I opted to work all night just in case it came down to the wire.

Also quite badly underestimated how much work was required for the Indiecade submission in terms of text. They needed ~300 word answers to a bunch of questions, and that was rather hard at 5-6 am.  Took me another hour or two.

Now going to take a day or two off to recharge before Rezzed!