Archive:
Back from a week away – house sitting for my Mum, and sneaking off to Develop, in Brighton – and it’s good to be back. Spent some of the down-time going through my notes, sketching out some ideas for the game, and doing a bit of development on the Playdate (nice little machine, lovely SDK).
Have added some wand-interactive moving platforms to the top of The Kitchen, which will lead you to a secret room. 
Fixed a couple of minor wand interactive bugs, along the way:
SetActorTickEnabled from PreRoomEnter to RoomEnterAlso added a secret room containing a Daglish Boombox. This one’s for the title track from Kettle, which seems apt for the Kitchen area. But I should probably add a big rusty kettle in there, to give people a clue. It’s not a game (or tune) I ever played back in the day.
Oh, and Moonbase now has its official UI name doo-dah.
Monday is Bad Pun Day, after all. (Every day is Bad Pun Day, who am I kidding)
I’ve got a milestone at the end of August – Second Playable – so I need to tie things together so people can get through all the zones, and have a rough idea as to how things are shaping up. I’ve added a temporary room to the end of Sandy Whites, that’ll take you back to the hub. Added a pickup to unlock that camera rotation (I still need to find a good joke for that) and some floating text to explain what you’ve picked up.
While I was in there, I added glass to the collision of the first rotating room. And a little sign to explain how you use the jump cancel to smash things.
I’m not sure if there’s a cheaper way to do glass, but I landed on this, which I’m hoping won’t utterly bork performance on the Switch. (It never seems to have a problem with geometry, but overdraw seems to spank it).
I love Unreal Engine, but some things are stupidly complicated. Loading Screens, for example. You’d think this’d be a really simple thing, baked in, but no. Lyra’s got some overly convoluted way of doing it, and most of the plugins on Unreal Marketplace rely on you having a persistent level, that you stream other levels into. Maenhir uses streaming levels in this way, but hides the streaming with little dog-legs, so I don’t need a loading screen in that…
Anyway. I could patch 2umo up to do something similar, but… I don’t want to. A loading screen is fine. Probably preferable, as the zones are completely distinct and have their own state. After much digging, I landed on Async Loading Screen which does what is says on the tin. One problem solved.
Another problem is the movies that play at the start of the game. You know, company logos, that kinda thing. Supposedly you can drop mp4 files into the Movies folder, the engine will package them up, and play them on initial load. Except it doesn’t. Well, not unless it’s precisely the format and resolution of the example Epic provide, which is some weird 1088p thing. I have tried, and failed, numerous times, to get this working, but today the gods have smiled on me; I managed to get Async Loading Screen to play the Triple Eh? logo animation. I should buy a lottery ticket.
The loading screen’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it’ll get me through certification.
(Future Gareth: The movies never played properly on Linux, and kept breaking on Windows, so yeah, they all got cut. Stupid f’ing things.)
Rounded up the rest of the stragglers. You can now play what I’ve made so far, end-to-end, with nothing missing.
I’ve put Space Toms at the end of Sandy Whites, but as is typical, if you turn your back for a minute, everything breaks. All my floating NPCs were too high, and worse, the sky-light now has a bug where it’s not rendering on the right-hand side of my ultra-wide. This is baffling, and I have no idea what’s causing it, so I’m not even going to waste time trying to look into it. Definitely wasn’t doing that on the previous engine version…
And now you can electrocute the Chimera robot. This makes me chuckle so much, I basically do it purposefully every time I play. Poor fella.
I was worried that the locked doors in the Moonbas weren’t obvious enough, so I’ve given them some shields. 
Somehow, a few of my blueprints have collected stale data-types. Nothing was obviously broken, but I don’t like build-warnings. Everything should be an error. Blow the whole thing up the minute there’s a sniff of something wrong. Yeah, I’m one of those people.
Spent the morning going through the build output, on all skus, and fixed up all offenders.
Then made a start on Orangery. This is the first room where I’ve gone back to Jet Set Willy to see what it does, and it’s basically a large hole in the ground. So I’m going to do something similar: throw oranges at the ground, and destroy the floor until the player falls into the room below. But it needs a new look.
I’ve been falling down the Computer Literacy Programme [https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/] rabbit-hole, the last few weeks, so I’ve gone for an Ian McNaught-Davis room.
Friends:
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