Archive:
Had a chum over for a few days, so naturally, he wanted to play the game. Now, despite what I say in my lectures, or to anyone that asks, I don’t really “playtest” my games very much. At least, not in the sense of “keep giving it to people, see what breaks, and get their feedback”. I know that’s not best practice, but I like being able to make things exactly how I want, and then fettling things into shape toward the end before people get their hands on it.
Lumo had two, intentional difficulty spikes, that I put in the wrong places. A room where you had to jump from chain-to-chain, across water, and the entire Ice Section.
The chain jumping was fine, if you used the keyboard, and of course, no one did. Joypad support went in quite late, and I never really used a pad during development. I assumed, (wrongly), that PC would be the lead SKU, so most people would be using the keyboard. Things changed rapidly during the last year, and that was the wrong call, even for PC players.
On reflection (sorry) the Ice Rooms should have appeared a little later in the game, and I knew that toward the end of development, but I couldn’t find the time to re-organise the map. In truth, I ran out of money, and desperately needed the content complete payment. So yeah, playtesting would have highlighted both of those, but in reality, I wouldn’t have been able to do much beyond the chain jumps… Which is why they’re not in the iOS version. (Yes, that exists. It might even get released. Hassle Andy@Thalamus.)
Anyway, 2umo’s first “playtest” went fine, everything’s unlocking at about the right time, Nightmare Room 2 was too tricky, but zero joypads were thrown at the TV. He found a bug, and I was able to look for unfinished bits and bobs, whilst he mooched about.
Which I spent today fixing. Hurrah!
It’s been on the list for a while, but yeah, the game really needs an indicator to show when the room has been rinsed of paint pickups. I’m also paranoid that there’s going to be a bug in them, somewhere, that’ll prevent 100% completion. So the morning was spent writing an on-screen debug dump of paint stats, with background checks for obvious types of breakage, with appropriate on-screen warnings. And the afternoon was spent bending some of that into checks the RoomControllers can run, on entry, to pop up a HUD indicator.
It’s a massive improvement.
I spent three hours going for a 100% run on the big telly, and hit a crash bug on the second visit to Sandy’s. Two rooms before the end. Gutted. I thought today would be the day… On the upside, the fix is simple: a nullptr check. On the downside, that stupid rotating room is STILL GIMBAL LOCKING, so there’s something else going on that I can’t see. Sigh
JFC I’m dumb. What was I applying the rotating room’s rotation to? The FRotator (Euler Angles) returned from GetActorRotation. I should have been using GetActorQuat. So I think I’ve fixed that, at least.
I fully intended on doing the music for the shoot-em-up sections myself, but I’ve run out of time. Phil’s crunching, so I’ve asked Ian Ford (DJ H0ffman) if he can squeak a couple out for me. Got the first this morning, and it works well. I love the change of style between the two musicians, it flips the mood of the mini-game in a really nice way.
There’s a bug in the wand, somewhere, that I can’t quite debug, but it looks like a race condition that lets it expire, while you’re dying, so the light and the UI never turn off. I can kinda see the crack this falls into, as the PlayerState’s processing attribute effects in a fairly blind way, and the PlayerCharacter side of the implementation was done before I started leaning into Gameplay Tags. I could clean all that out, but it’s a bit late in the day. Patched in some more checks, but I don’t think I’ve squashed it.
Added a “Warp To Hub” button to the pause menu. I’ve had a console command to do that for a long time, but recently, when I’m playing for those last few paint pickups, I’m using it a fair bit, so everyone else is going to want to, as well. What I’ve not decided is if it should be unlocked from the start, or after the player’s collected the main inventory items and is actually “on the hunt”. It’s doing the latter atm. I’ll play for a while and see how I feel.
Went back to Sandy’s, tidied up a few things, added the Zone Name UI to that start, and added a new room with spinning fans that float you up to a Teleporter that takes you to the first Gilby Room.
Gilby’s animated, has audio, can jump over gaps, and into the oblivion. Might need a couple more checks to make sure he’s always in a valid place, but I’m mostly there. And I think I’ve found the look. Full-on, Disco glitter:
I spent 3.5 hours on the sofa, this afternoon, doing a full-run on the Switch. A friend wanted to try it, so I made them a build this morning and then settled in to see what would break. Two problems:
That last one is really annoying. I dumped ticks to see what was running in the background, but I couldn’t see anything obviously broken. I’m fairly sure I don’t have a leak – I don’t do anything outside UE’s memory management – so that means I’m going to have to get the big guns out, sit down and profile a long play session. Not looking forward to that.
I’ve tweaked the character controller settings on the Switch version, but just as a finger in the air guess. I’ll sit-down in the week, measure the movement distance over time, and compare it to the PC version until I get them matching. Royal pain in the arse.
On the plus side, I did 100% of Moonbas and Willy’s, and enough of Sandy’s to unlock the completion sequence, so today was the first day that I rolled credits on a full play through of the game. Huzzah!
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