Hi, Travis here -
A WEEK UNTIL RELEASE AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Okay now that that's out of my system - this past week has been one of finishing/polishing stuff up. I'm reviewing the commit logs for the past week and it certainly feels like a lot longer than a week since the last one of these.
Last Saturday it became very clear that we would have to update from Unity 5.4.1 to 5.5.1 - updating your engine it pretty scary since usually it fixes more than it breaks but there's always gonna be some very strange new bugs that show up. In this case, fortunately, they were all small issues (assuming that the "fall through the floor when a room loads" thing doesn't become a continued pox upon me). There were a bunch of good fixes though that came along with it so it was a good decision. It also fixed a bug where Projectors were rendering twice if there were any transparent objects rendered by the camera - how's that for a weird bug. But then, go figure, I ended up not using a Projector for the flashlight anyways. The weirdest little bug it introduced was one new frame between scene loads - so I had to extend my "fade to black" camera script to cover for that.
After that I worked more on specimen - 11 is just about done and 10 has behavior but no assets. It is the scariest combination of cube, cylinder, and small capsule.
After the weekend was taken up by Specimen and engine upgrades, Monday I got down to the deep nitty gritty of doing splash screens - which turned out to be a very peculiar problem. Up until this point Spooky's has been a one scene game (that loads the rooms as additive scenes) - however we ran in to a bit of a problem there. Through the process of development we stuffed enough stuff in to the main scene that it ended up taking around 6 seconds for the app to launch. Which - first off that's not great - and secondly one of our splash screens is a video...which for whatever reason when introduced to the Main scene played perfectly on my computer but stuttered like heck on Sheena's. So I ended up rearranging the entire loading process, spacing things out, and now it takes around 1 second to load the application and the video plays smooth everywhere! Hooray!
After that the fine toothed comb turned back to User Interface on Tuesday & Wednesday where I finished the Password dialog in the Options menu - it uses an old style panel of letters to pick from, which should reduce ambiguity compared to the old game plus stand the test of Localization where entering certain characters could be awkward, plus controller support. Additionally I got the mansion picker finished in this UI work - which will be how you start Karamari Hospital & Endless Mode when we have them finished. Plus the workshop support stuff but that's farther out in the future. After that I did a pass where I added some UI sounds and made sure that full controller support worked all over.
Thursday (yesterday) I was quite mortified to realize we were missing the cool story title crawl from the new game. So I spent all day working on that. It required more tearing and refactoring from the loading process but ultimately came together and (I think) is super cool. I also did some background tech work for Spec 7 to introduce a "temporary" floor and series of rooms. After that I tested VR and made myself motion sick trying to figure out a few weird things and had to lay down for a while.
Which brings us to today! I just worked on assets. Modeling, texturing, and integration in to the game. Chipping away at the long list of things left to do.
Now, the astute reader will realize that I just covered all the things I was doing. In the past week Sheena has been going absolutely HAM on getting all the scripted rooms laid out and getting all their materials properly imported and sorted, in addition to getting all the Notes integrated & ready for localization. It's a short sentence but she's been doing an absolute pile of work and I think it's about done too (I've just been so heads down on my stuff trying to make it through this sprint to the finish line).
See you next week! Hopefully for the release!!!