Currently, the state of Lab 77 is as follows
- 136 of 144 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining eight , three require further work and five require more testing or minor fixes.
- Artwork, music, sound design and voice overs are being worked on.
- A demo for the Steam Next Fest is nearly done.
For the last two weeks my focus has been on the demo of Lab 77. As I mentioned last dev diary, I found that the underlying systems I have built up over the last two years working on this game were robust enough to adapt to the demo. I was concerned that lessening the amount of levels from 77 to 11 would be a bigger task, but this was not the case. Only one issue was encountered with the end credits scene, but this was thankfully simple to fix by adapting a few scene indexes.
Having ensured the underlying systems worked I went on to testing and adding polish. I added a music track, fixed up the main menu to ensure no dev tools were left in the build and then went on to the levels themselves. Firstly, I started implementing updated modular backgrounds and adding parallax effects to them. Secondly, I did a lot of testing. This testing was focused on two things: making sure the difficulties can be completed and smoothing out the order of the levels to ensure they scale nicely in difficulty. Having done this testing I can now say that I have set the order of the first 11 levels in stone and that they can be completed on easy, medium or hard. Though I will say, to complete them on hard you have to know the quirks of the characteristics of the game, which is what I intended the hard difficulty to be.
Lastly, I realised that I had forgotten to fix the background in the tutorial although I fixed the backgrounds in all the other levels. This is all part of my goal to deliver a product of high quality without omissions. I also decided to record my doing this, to give a look behind the scenes of the process, which you can see here. There are still some elements of the demo that I would like to improve on, but it is very, very close to being finished now.
Outside of the demo I have received some very good artwork for level 55. This level is one of the special levels, and you can say it is akin to an easter-egg level as it is the only level where you will not need a placement. Furthermore, I now have all the components I need for making the backgrounds for all the levels, but I will not start doing this until the demo is complete. There are still some bugs that need to be resolved, but I believe I may have hit the point at which testing yields fewer bugs each time.
That is all for this Dev Diary.
-Olav