When we pushed out Alpha 53 on Friday, 13th of May, it was the day before my vacation. And it was also the last day in our old office. The good thing was that we've only moved across the street. But still, finishing and testing a Holodance update, while at the same time creating a new Gameplay Teaser, while at the same time moving out of our office was fairly intense.
Especially when I ran into that rather nasty bug that made Alpha 53 end up on the opt-in beta-branch. This bug never occurred in the Unity editor. It also does not occur with development builds, which is kind of nasty because that's where you get all the information logged when something goes wrong. It only ever happened on actual release builds that don't give you that much information when anything goes wrong.
You may have noticed the funny mix of "development build" and "trial version", an actual release build and desktop stuff on the Alpha 53 gameplay teaser. Now you know why: This video was shot while at the same time trying to nail down this issue.
The I was on vacation.
Finally, last Sunday I returned from our little trip to Orcas Island, near Seattle. It was lovely but I still have a rather nasty Jet Lag!
Monday I started setting up our new office and Monday in the evening, I had my development machine and Vive up and running. But no Internet, yet.
Tuesday way more setting up the office, a little bit of playtime in VR and organizing things related to our moving.
Today (Wednesday), I finally got to work a little on Holodance, reviewing the upcoming Level 5 and finally doing some debugging. We now also have Internet, but don't ask what kind of Internet (6 MBit/s downstream, less than 1 MBit/s upstream - it's a nightmare that I hope I'll eventually wake up from).
The good news:
I figured out what's causing the music to not start: Apparently, the new levels consume too much memory which results in the music not starting and some other unpleasant issues like the laser pointer no longer being interactive. There's a workaround (change the quality setting to restart / reload everything), and it does not always happen. But it urgently needs to be fixed.
And that's the bad news: Holodance currently loads everything up during startup. While this makes startup a little long and annoying, once the game is running, switching levels is really fast. We'll need to change this, which is not terribly complicated but also not trivial.
I'll be working on a much smarter mechanism for loading and unloading assets fulltime until I have this working reliably, so I can finally push Alpha 54, which is essentially Alpha 53 without that particular bug, to the main branch. If things go well, this should land on Friday.
Also, if things go well, we'll hopefully soon have a real Internet connection in our office.
Stay tuned!