Unity in Pain
Hey! I'm pretty tired as of writing this so I'll try to keep it short.
I'd like to start by saying that often it feels like Unity is an indie game engine, as in, it feels like there are 5 🐁🐭 working on it whenever they're bored. There are so many unpredictable things in the engine that sometimes it feels like a round of Dark Souls is easier than whatever this is.
Case in point, timelines. I rely heavily on events to pause/resume the timelines, and for fading/unfading the game in-between transitions. Those events sometimes don't trigger because of timing issues related to framerates and other deeper aspects.
So I'm currently spending a lot of time trying to make Unity resume/pause the cutscenes I've made without skipping important signals, otherwise you might end up looking at an empty black screen instead of whatever's going on just because the unfading event didn't trigger.
I'll talk about my list for this week:
Prepare the challenger event in the bar by adding the scenes in and making sure the dialogue flows smoothly. ⌛ It underwent a few changes, so I postponed this until Monday.
Prepare an... not sure how to call it without spoiling, but basically there's another animation that I need to add into the bar this month. ⌛ Going to be done as soon as I take care of the previous task.
Continue progressing with the cutscene that connects the bar to going back to the ship. ✅ Finished all the cutscenes from the bar ending all the way to getting back to the ship, including a teaser at the end. It was very tough just as expected, a lot of things need to be synchronized perfectly and that's why sometimes things in timelines might look "unpolished", but once we're ahead with the content in the city I can slowly update the older timelines/sequences to be a bit more polished as I won't feel as much pressure of not releasing content.
Fix any bugs that come up and release a hotfix with all of them by Friday. 🤔 I don't think there was a hotfix this week because I didn't receive a gamebreaking bug, most of what I've received are dark screens during cutscenes which is what I'm trying to work on so let's hope I get this done today and I might actually release another hotfix on Monday or Tuesday.
That's about it. The problem with Unity is mainly that they are often ambitious about new features, but you often encounter issues such as the timing one I noticed where the issue was actually addressed 4 years ago and some Unity developer said "they're working on a fix", then 4 years later after many updates to that package the issue is still there it doesn't really make you happy but you have to adapt to it for better or worse.
Have a nice weekend!