Pre-Holiday Week ❄️🎄 Ho-Ho-Ho🎅🎁
Phew, it's already mid December. Probably many of us were looking forward to this time of the year. Last week my Friday wasn't great, had to waste a lot of time getting somewhere, coming back, delays from public transport…
But I had 2 days to rest so now it's time to push forward and deliver what was promised.
I'll start by mentioning what things I need to do this week, then I'll mention what I managed to finish last week.
Release the December content build by end of the week (by 20th December). The improvements and bugfixes made last week will be delivered in the December content build to prevent wasting time on compiling new builds.
Keep working on an animation that will be released possibly in February, due to it being a bit further ahead in the ship storyline.
Write more dialogues if I get the time.
Tasks finished last week:
Finish the two animations that have been in progress since last week. ⌛ The one I still need to work on needs to be remade, it's a difficult animation and I'd rather do it right than release it half-assed.
Once the above is done, resume writing dialogues that involve the previously mentioned scenes. ⌛ Did write a bit last week, but need to write more this week hopefully.
Fix a bug on some android devices where a timeline/cutscene whose playback speed is changed gets frozen. ❌ This bug is most definitely an Unity bug because I did try the scenario on multiple android devices of different manufacturers and couldn't reproduce it, so when remaking the build this should hopefully not happen for the person who reported the issue.
If an animation has below 60FPS, the dynamic hair bones, chest bones, etc. can get a bit messy ✅. I optimized the game during animations so that maintaining 60FPS shouldn't be a problem anymore, preventing physics issues.
Extra bugfixes that will be released with the December content build:
Scene was not showing in village laboratory on all platforms ✅ Fixed.
Fixed saving/loading to file not working on android, now you can save to local storage on your Android phone and load the save after reinstalling or clearing data/cache, making sure to not lose the saved data. ✅
Added the refresh rate on the resolution dropdown and removed many duplicated resolution entries, showing only resolution items with a refresh rate of 60hz or higher. ✅
Added a vsync toggle button. ✅ On Variable Refresh Rate displays (newer monitors), the monitor will not correctly synchronize with the game's own VSync implementation, so disabling it will fix a strange issue where the game runs in slow motion.
Fixed lag spike when conversations start. ✅ Now things should be smooth.
Fixed a rotation issue that would cause dialogue avatars to be rotated forever ✅
Added some boundaries in the lake map to prevent being able to walk outside the map. ✅
Special thanks to everyone who reported issues in the game to me. I was very motivated to work on them and the fixes will benefit everyone, for example the animation performance optimizations should help all devices, even though it was causing issues on older devices for the most part. I'd mention everyone who reported a bug to me, but I didn't ask if they consent to having their name displayed in the post, so I'll instead ask them if they want to be immortalized in the game's credits :D
There are many more things I can do to make the game more pleasant to play in the long run, but I need to take it one step at a time. One of the primary goals right now is finishing the content path we have and then we'll revisit some parts of the game, adding minigames and so on.
Another very important goal is to attract as many wishlists as possible for the Steam release next year, so I'll need to spend some time on recording new videos of the game to post on social media.
I'll most likely return on Friday with a new status update and then next week I'll be taking some mental time-off, taking advantage of the fact that during the end of the year celebrations the "online world" is a bit quieter so it's probably the best time to reset.