Bug of the Week
This week's bug has to do with the camera in the level select menu. The camera originally was a fixed horizontal distance from the center point of the level (the center of the pillar). This meant that when the character went beyond that distance, the camera would flip over, meaning the arrows showing which way to move would be flipped, and it just looked really stupid.
The fix was relatively straightforward, now I offset based on the character's position so that the character is always between the camera and the center of the pillar.
Metrics Recording
After I discovered that Unity Analytics both isn't GDPR compliant, and seems to be primarily designed for free-to-play/retention-based games and not actually for making games "good", I decided to implement my own metrics backend. I've been working on it little by little for the last few weeks, and I finally got it all working, with a web endpoint storing data into a mongodb backend. Now, when various game events occur, I can track them and use that data to fine tune progression / level difficulty. Here's an example of the "crash" collection, which I can use to determine which levels people crash on the most, and how long it takes for them to crash.
I'm pretty happy with this, as it's fairly robust and expandable, is GDPR compliant, and is free!
New Website Url
So my old domain registration for www.pogochamp.bike was set to expire on Oct 6. I've changed a lot about how the website works over the year since I first registered it, including changing to using Netlify as the web host. I got sick of dealing with multiple different services, So I decided to let that domain registration expire, thinking that I could just re-register it with Netlify afterwards. Unfortunately that's... not how it works. So instead I've decided to change the game's url to pogochampgame.com , a much more normal url. Pogochamp.bike will live on in my heart though.
New Computer Complete
Last week I got very lucky and happened to check the Nvidia website when 3080s came back in stock for a few minutes. The new card got delivered this week, so my new computer is finally complete! Pogochamp now runs at nearly 600 FPS in the unity editor, which is pretty much pointless because my monitor is only 60 hz, but it's still fun. I spent most of Wednesday taking apart and rebuilding my old PC before I mail it to a friend.
Vote!
I voted, and you should too!
Changelog
- Added several new swimming levels.
- Added rings you have to jump through in order to activate the goal zone.
- Updated the level select camera so that it doesn't go upside down when you move far away from the center of the tower.
- Add more levels to the level select.
- Update various difficulty ratings based on player feedback.
- Fix missing paths between levels.
- Update goal zone size in several levels to be more forgiving.
- Update level select input directions for several connections.
- Add even more levels to the level select.
- Add metrics recording that reports to a custom metrics backend.
- Fix metrics upload not working in release builds.