Developer Diary 39 - Bug Squashing time!

You may have noticed art has been a bit slow lately, and that’s simply because I’ve been pouring so much work into the game. It’s still not where it needs to be for release 3, but it’s all starting to come together. All stores have been properly implemented, and now I just need to polish the rough edges, and add a few more work locations. Things are looking good.

One feature I have been meaning to put in is called the “Index”, where you can access information regarding characters and places in the game. Once it’s all more fleshed out, this should give you good intel on where you wanna go and who you wanna talk to. The nicest thing about this feature is that I was able to re-use a lot of assets that I already had, and just puzzled them together to make it work. From a design standpoint, it’s fairly simple, but the result is something I am quite proud of. Of course, it can look a lot prettier than it currently does, but these things can be polished up down the line.

If you’ve read all of these logs, you know that at some point I ran into the issue with textures being too big for the compiler to handle, crashing it while making an APK. I now found out exactly why this is happening and that it was never the texture size to begin with. This means that all my texture splitting was useless in the end, and needs to be undone, the end result is still a positive. Art can stay nice and crisp and I don’t need to deal with the headache of splitting art before it goes into the game.

Finally, it is just fixing bug after bug. It’s an endless and also unrewarding process. Spending time to make something work, is time that you don’t really see. Three hours of drawing versus three hours of hunting down why this texture is misbehaving in a very specific scenario. It can be frustrating, but sometimes funny as well. Here’s a few:

• Fixed an exploit where you could leave the store without losing energy. Thief!

• Fixed a bug where the characters arms would shoot up for a split second in the Blossom Clinic. Kung Fu DLC?

• Fixed Lizzie showing up in the tanning booth, while she should be working!

• Fixed the shadow of your characters neck displaying on top of her face. No thanks, 5 o'clock shadow.

So yeah. I know the art hasn’t been as consistent as it should be, but once this release is out, I will refocus my attention and start grinding some juicy art again.

As always, thank you very much for your support <3

Albatross