Malevolent Planet 2D - Accounting in Space
Hey! It's time to tell you what I've managed to get done this week. For the recent release, check out this link.
So this week was not easy, development wise. However, I did manage to get everything I wanted done by the end of this week, in addition to many more things I didn't expect I'd have to do. I think that right now the game is more stable than it used to be, and certainly more performant. More details incoming.
Bugs:
Emma's face texture looks compressed when compared to sharp suit texture. ✅ This is now permanently fixed, simply because I don't compress the textures anymore for any of the graphic settings in the game.
Misaligned chibi sprites when clothes are first worn (gets fixed when you start walking) ✅ I had to make some modifications to the player character's script when a clothing item is equipped to get the values that decide what way the character is facing, so this is now fine.
During scenes the textures can also appear compressed. ✅ This shouldn't really happen anymore.
Black Screen after a scene in the lake during the samples gathering. ✅ Also fixed, it was happening during one choice.
The towel clothing sometimes appears to still be worn when day3 starts. ✅ This bug was in fact caused by a much worse bug. The much worse bug was that the player inventory was being filled by a ton of duplicate items and there was no reason for this to happen. This gave me a lot of headache yesterday, but I eventually figured out that when a NPC unequips an item, instead of it going into their own inventory, it goes into the player's and that leads to a ton of issues because NPCs often unequip/equip items such as when a scene loads or they get activated.
Content:
Everything in regards to the new scenes that had to be implemented & drawn. ✅ They're now in the latest release.
Any issues related to colliders, sprites, etc have now been finished, including the design and implementation of the new elevator UI. ✅ You can now freely freeroam around the ship. The GIF below might take a while to load.
All crew chibi sprites have been updated to be four directional. ✅
Releases:
I want to release the content finished by the end of the week (including ship freeroaming and curing crewmates) on the 23rd or 24th of November (Thursday or Friday). ✅ I worked as much as I could to get everything finished & tested from Monday till now.
I want to release the latest public build on websites like newgrounds, etc. ✅
Marketing/Social Media Engagement:
Check the forums and try to record any bug reports people have made. ⌛Not so much, was too busy. The fixes I've made should however fix many of those bug reports indirectly.
Post any art WiP this week.✅ Posted the elevator UI before I started implementing it into the game.
One of the most important aspects of what I've started doing this week was disabling the light sources of the Unity Lighting 2D system in all the scenes of the game. I've managed to do this in the ISA content, and I'm going to do it for the post-ISA content as well for the next release.
This will greatly improve performance, stability, especially on mobile devices. We're going to use overlay light sprites from now on for the design of maps.
I also did a lot of exception handling to make it less likely that players might have a game breaking bug during the ISA.
Thank you for your attention and for taking the time to read this! In fact, there was a lot more I've had to do this week, but it would take too long to type it. I hope you'll have a nice weekend.