The development was going pretty good for the most part, already finished most of the game so there were just a bunch of bug fixes and polishing left to be done. There was still one big issue that was worrying me though, but it seemed like it didn't cause that many problems, which was the case until we released the demo.
At that point, the buggy input system and incomplete controller support got reported too many times to be ignored and I decided to just go ahead and move the project to a much much newer version of the game engine, mostly so I get access to a better foundation for the input system.
The old settings menu and first look at trying to figure out gamepad support in Unity
As expected, the change to a newer engine sprung up a bunch of smaller and bigger problems, but on a quick test run, I was actually pleased with the amount and severity of them, so that went pretty well. Now I had to completely scrap the old input system and UI navigation and start from scratch… yeah… that was way scarier, especially when I remembered how much time I spent building the previous one.
The actual size of one of the log files and the number of lines of info in it.
But, to my delight, I learned a lot the first time I was doing this, and the new Unity input system package is pretty amazing. There was a bunch of documentation reading and tutorial watching in order, but after setting up some basic stuff, I was already super happy to see some controllers responding that just didn’t previously.
So at this point, I decided just to delete the old system from the game completely and start building the new one from the ground up. This resulted in probably one of my most stressful and work-loaded couple of days, during which, even if I went to sleep, I could barely relax enough to get any. So for the most part, I was just trying to focus, listen to some podcasts or sitcoms in the background, and power through the whole thing.
After the first 2 days, the new input system was basically fully functional, you could control the game, and navigate the UI and I also added the previously unavailable option to play with the mouse, which felt really great to play with, so that was a nice pick-me-up. But, there were still a billion issues that needed to be resolved, along with two major functionalities - rebinding and UI button icons, that change according to your binding.
New controls menu
Thankfully again, the newer system was way better prepared for this stuff too, so the setup for rebinding was done way quicker this time around, and also it was made way more solid. From that foundation, the UI icons were also somewhat of a breeze.
Using mouse controls to select relic at a start of a new run
Last but not least, I wanted to add a controllable cursor for the gamepads, so the UI can be controlled in the same way as a mouse and gamepad, so that was another challenge. Still, after putting in enough hours, it turned out pretty great and the game again felt way better and most importantly, less prone to bugs.
Enabling mouse aim is now one click away and here is how it looks in-game
In conclusion, after the change was done, I was extremely happy I did it, even though the situation was pretty rough. Changing something so crucial to your game is always daunting since it’s interconnected to every nook and cranny of the project. I am still facing and fixing some issues that arose from this change, but the amount of stuff this made better and the number of bugs that got fixed in the process were definitely worth it!
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