Currently, the state of Lab 77 is as follows:
- 182 of 187 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining five bugs, three require further testing and two require more work.
- Music and sound design are being worked on.
Following the debacle of wrangling Unity's UI I needed a shift of focus. Thankfully I got one as the final piece of the artwork puzzle came in, the death blocks. Since I first implemented the death blocks they have been represented as a red coloured floor tile, which works for testing but it far from good enough for the finished game. Now Lab 77 has new animated death blocks that really complete the look of the game. Adding some animation to these blocks as well as the conveyors and teleportation blocks really has given a lot of life to the game world that I had not realised would happen when I first started working on the game.
As a side note, this is the rough sketch I provided first to show what my ideas were. It is quite amazing to me how well they came out in comparison to the initial sketches.
Since implementing this artwork required more Unity prefab work I was naturally a bit apprehensive given the previous issues. I also had to remind myself how I made the conveyor belts with the new artwork as it is technically three different animations combined into one object. Basically, the way both the death blocks and conveyor belts work is the left and right edge tiles are veneers so to speak, and the colliders are all tied to the central block of X length, even when that length is zero as is the case with some of these blocks that are two wide. In these instances, the middle block can not be seen but it still provides the hit box and collider.
After having implemented the new artwork I was able to do some more playtesting. At this stage this largely involves finding small areas of improvements and refinements, since I have not uncovered any more major bugs that need to be resolved. This is quite a repetitive and tiresome process in many ways, and it is also all to easy to become blind to your own mistakes when you have been looking at and working on the same game for as long as I have. I have previously had some playtesting assistance from others, but not recently as I had been working on resolving some major bugs. Though I do aim to pick up some of that coming up and do some more data gathering on the number of placements per level now that I have the level designs finalised.
Going forwards, the next big step is implementing Wwise. Admittedly, this is not something I have any experience with yet, however I am not going at this on my own. I am hoping that I will be able to share more about this in two weeks, but I do not want to promise anything as this may be a longer term project. I do believe that I have set up a good underlying infrastructure that can handle this, but I am also aware that things often go wrong in game dev. I am also going to take more time for playtesting and data gathering. I have not yet determined how I am going to do this, but I will decide soon.
Lastly, I have not mentioned this in one of these for a while, but with the continued free-fall of the games industry it is more important than ever to support your local indie dev. It is a hard time for so many people working on brilliant games and the more support they get the better, Be it wishlists, likes, reviews or buying games any and everything helps. If you are interested in supporting me, and by extension Lab 77, you can check out the various links here. And if you chose to support me and Lab 77 then I thank you very, very much.
As a last side note, I am trying to be better about posting things directly to Patreon as well as the linked Discord, but keeping on top of all the time management as just one man is not the easiest.
That is all for this regular length Dev Diary, more to come in two weeks.
-Olav