Hello everyone, and welcome back to another Mole Maiden progress report.
Last month, I mentioned how I planned to dedicate the month to addressing technical debt, and that’s exactly what I did. Let's dive into some of the cool things I accomplished this month that will help speed up development.
We Are Not Cavemen, We Have Technology:
First, I created new builds of the game and played through as much of it as I could. This process revealed many bugs and incomplete features that prevented me from advancing deeper into the game. Many bugs and neglected features were finally addressed.
A major fix involved the game's broken UI scaling. Mole Maiden's UI was notoriously only scaled correctly for 1920x1080p displays. But now, it supports all 16:9 displays. Fixes like these were plentiful this month, and they boost my confidence in sharing my game with new people, knowing that important information won't be obscured.
Additionally, I discovered that Unity has a built-in playtest feature that allows you to program code to playtest the game automatically.
Let me use an example: a notorious bug in Mole Maiden was the "Brain Dead" bug (previously known as the "Christmas Tree"). This bug would lock the player's input to a single state and was triggered when more than one Penny object was present in a scene—a fairly common situation given the game's size. Previously, I had to remember to deactivate the Penny object each time I loaded a new scene, then wait 30 minutes to make a new build and PRAY that there wasn’t an active Penny object somewhere that would cause a soft lock.
Now, I've written code that scans each scene in my game in three minutes, identifies active Penny objects, and informs me which scenes need fixing. This saves a tremendous amount of time and keeps this sneaky glitch under control, especially in a game with 140 scenes.
Scope Adjustments:
As I wrapped up the month, I reviewed the remaining tasks and decided what I could eliminate to support my mental health. I've decided to cut "Bacon" from the requested burrow league boss fights to reach Coppra. Bacon was a humorous character and a unique twist on a fire boss, but ultimately, I never developed a compelling idea for his boss fight. When I finally did, it was too late to implement anything substantial in the game's current state. So, he's been cut, along with his area. If anyone is curious about what could have been, I encourage you to hack the game when it releases.
What’s Next?
It’s time to finalize the production of boss fights, starting with the Diamond Trio (finally). These are the three major bosses you must face back to back before fighting Coppra. These will be completed by the end of this month.
I also have a very exciting announcement. I am calling upon the Mole Maiden community to help push Mole Maiden across the finish line by opening a brand new Playtest Program! Starting today, you can sign up to be a volunteer playtester for Mole Maiden and help me find bugs, balance the game, and maybe make some suggestions that will make it into the final release. To sign up to be a playtester, please head over to the Mole Maiden Steam page and select the button to sign up for the playtest. The first 20 people who do so will be brought into the program.
I am looking forward to interacting with all of you to make Mole Maiden a better game.
Until next time.