Good evening!
This week, the war on the bugs actually got worse instead of better. Following the release of the second 1.3 open beta, more bug reports rolled in, and rampant testing ensued. Bleh.
Ahh, the classic Unity NullReferencException. Flowlab Edition™.
However, there have already been a couple devlogs about debugging (our game attracts bugs like a rotting pot of soup in the Amazon Rainforest) So I'd like to do a deep dive into some cool new tech:
Level Editor Progress!
So, figuring out how the level editor is going to be laid out has been the topic of discussion for quite a while. Where are things going to be oriented? Will the editor be vertical or horizontal? How much versatility should there be?
After a lengthy discussion in the developer channel, I decided to test a vertical track for level editing. This offers less space than making the track horizontal would, but it would also be more game accurate, and it turns out that other vertical rhythm games have these kinds of editors too.
So, after a lot of finagling, here's the first system done: scrolling!
You can scroll by clicking and dragging or by scrolling the mouse wheel!
Despite it seeming rather simple, getting this system to work was a bit of a headache:
First, Parse levels can be from 400-800 lines long on average. And having 800 objects moving around in a level editor would slow the game down so much that it wouldn't be playable. So instead, the bar objects teleport themselves to the top or bottom of the screen once they cease from view, kind of like a conveyor belt. Thanks to this, only a handful of objects need to be in the scene at all for scrolling to work :).
Detecting mouse movement and mouse wheels is also difficult. It took a couple of re-dos of the code to make something that worked for left-click scrolling and mouse wheel scrolling at the same time to work, but thankfully that problem sorted itself out, too.
The finished system is far more elegant than the old one, thankfully.
Next Up:
Now that this UI system is done, the next steps are getting the bar pieces to change their values properly as the player scrolls, so that'll be the next step. However, that is going to take a day at most, so there should be much more to report on next devlog. It's been almost adrenaline inducing to finally be putting together this feature I've wanted for the game for so long!
Let us know if you have any, at all, UX things to say about the editor - editor features you like, quirks you appreciate or annoy you, details in editors, etc. We want this editor to be as intuitive as the rest of the game is, so let us know your thoughts!
Thanks for following the devlog!!
-Encabulated Games