Malevolent Planet 2D - The Reassembly

Hey! I'm making this one early this Friday, so that the public release won't be eclipsed by this status report.

The most important thing that happened this week was that while I thought that I fixed the crash/infinite loop last week, it turned out not to be the case.

The cause was, the Unity Engine itself. I've updated Unity from 2020 LTS to 2022 LTS and magically the issue isn't happening anymore, but there were plenty of reasons why I avoided doing this. However, I got tired of looking at threads in native code so I thought I'd rather deal with later on issues if the unity update actually fixes it.

(Huge thanks to AndyVipEvil for testing this issue and helping me find a place where this issue was more reproducible which really sped things up, in addition to general QA testing)

In any case, here's my checklist progress for this week and I'll make a small change, in that I'll first show what I've done for each category then what I didn't do will be at the end.

Content (extras that weren't planned for initially):

• Started drawing Anna, Sarah, and Bill, members of Melissa's crew. ✅

• Rendered one scene that may happen in the Human Camp and started drawing it, it'll be an animation. ✅

• Planned the content flow for what should happen in the February build. ✅

• Plan scene(s) for the February build. ✅ We should have 2 animations I think, but I'd like to draw more static scenes too to complement the animations since they take less time to draw.

Bugs:

• Thorough the entire intro, the minimap of the ISA Lobby/Entrance is being shown. ✅ I changed the way dialogues play out by hiding the minimap and the top-left icons when a dialogue is playing, so the minimap won't show here anymore.

• The "Hide", "Skip", "Auto" buttons can appear to be toggled on (green 🟩) even if they aren't, especially when the dialogue window reappears. ✅ This should be fixed now, couldn't reproduce it.

• During the initial dialogue, clicking at the bottom center of the screen (where the ISA entrance would be on the actual map) will skip most of the dialogue and sometimes result in an empty dialogue window. ✅ Fixed, it was a race condition.

• Moving using keyboard causes the minimap show/hide button to change appearance (between "X" and "-") and pressing space shows/hides it. ✅ Fixed, you can only hide the minimap now by clicking on the - but I should also add configurable hotkeys to achieve the same thing, maybe mapped to M.

• Bubbles and floor frames in the tubes in the top corners of the reception area are drawn above your character. ✅ Should be fixed.

• The Dialogue Avatars don't fade "right". ✅ This requires more work, but I've implemented a quick fix that makes the fading instantaneous until I can render the avatar to a texture which can give us more features later, such as shadowing avatars.

• Morris and Nurse Dialogue is a bit glitchy. ✅ Should be fixed now, as much as I could fix it given the lack of time.

• It can look like the first few messages in the first dialogue in the ISA Gym are skipped. ✅ Should be fixed.

• When returning from the showers on the first night, trying to enter Male Bedrooms shows the character wearing the academy outfit rather than the night dress. ✅ Fixed.

• In the ISA Garden, the blonde girl (I assume Gloria) walks along the bottom of the walkway and clips through the flower pots. ✅ Should be fixed, but the clipping is still happening and will be updated later.

• During the first few messages in the pheromone bush dialogue of Suspicious Grass, it looks as if the auto button is enabled. Couldn't reproduce this 🤔

• The bush quest marker "?" is still visible even after finishing the quest. ✅ Should be fixed now.

• Desks/shelves/counters at the bottom right corner of the first Laboratory area are glitchy. ✅ Should be fixed now.

• Cannot enter the medical bay without being dressed up as a nurse. ✅ Should also be fixed.

Mechanics (UI extra):

• Made the main menu UI a bit nicer. ✅

Release(s):

• I'll release the public build today that has the content from beginning of Day1 to ending of Day3. 🤔

Now for the tasks that couldn't be done yet.

Bugs:

• On some resolutions, the resolution drop-down list in the Options menu isn't wide enough for higher resolution and refresh rate entries, causing the refresh rate part to be cut. ❌ I think I shouldn't even have refresh rate entries, not sure how to do that.

• There isn't a Company Name set under the project settings for the game, making the game data of the game being stored in a folder called "DefaultCompany". ❌ Changing this can break your saves, I need to think of a script that moves the files from the old location to where the new location would be if I change the company name.

• The Load Game main menu item is visible only when you have local saves. ❌ Didn't have time to fix it yet because it's also impossible to save/load from file yet on WebGL.

• When you go through the intro cutscene for the first time, something gets added to the inventory and causes Emma's portrait to disappear. ❌ I'll think of ways to deal with this next week.

• ISA being a confusing abbreviation, due to it applying to both International Space Academy and International Space Administration, which can be a bit confusing. ❌ I'll think of a way to clarify the difference between the 2 abbreviations within the game.

• The Quests list in the Quest Journal can be dragged around. ❌ Need to rework the quest UI next week.

• You can move your character when the Quest Journal window is opened by clicking outside of it. ❌ Didn't yet have time to fix this.

• Clicking Character and minimap buttons still trigger character movement. ❌ Didn't yet have enough time to fix this sadly.

• Speech Bubbles are glitchy, some stay on the screen forever, some get skipped or replaced by displaying previous messages again, and it's possible to trigger multiple instances of the same dialogue which will play at the same time. ❌ This has less to do with me because it's not my code but I'll try to make it better since background speech dialogues will be used thorough the game.

• In the Medical Room, when you're near the doctor or near the exit and you're not hovering the mouse over either of the elements, the dialogue/exit action icon is displayed near the privacy screen in the upper right part of the map. ❌ Didn't yet have time to look into this.

Mechanics:

• I want to work on a few mechanics within the dialogue system that would allow me to have more control over what happens during an animation. ❌ ...

• I want to be able to change an expression during a dialogue line without memorizing words. ❌ ...

Content:

• Add the rendered human camp map to the game as a playable area. ❌ No time yet :(

• Plan the dialogue flow for what happens in the human camp and immediately afterwards. ❌ Will start next week.

Basically it was a difficult week for me, a very difficult one in fact. When I saw that the game was still entering an infinite loop I was very upset.

I didn't really know how to deal with it and I knew I can't release the game in such a state because having a game crash your PC isn't nice.

My last hope after all the debugging I had to do was that it was actually low-level engine libraries entering a loop for whatever reason and although I didn't really believe an update could fix it it seems it did, so I wasted almost a week on an issue that wasn't caused directly by me.

This started happening in October I think when I updated the 2020 LTS version but it wasn't happening frequently enough for me to notice during testing, but it got worse progressively.

In any case, I can't reproduce it at all in the latest 2022 LTS so at least that's done, but it introduced more issues I had to deal with and this drastically lowered my amount of free time.

I'll try to catch up on everything and also take care of the public release today, so I wish you a great weekend!