Hour 44
Got more sound effects set up, cleaned up the instructions a bit, and added a "Join random game" button. The Photon Network seems to be back up, so I had a chance to do some online testing with some folk at Develteam.com . Here are the bugs we found:
1. Ghost characters -- I don't know why, but sometimes a player duplicates themselves.
[FIXED] 2. Boss HP bar is misleading; if there are multiple players, then the boss has more HP...but the bar thinks there is always one player. Also, multiplying the HP by the player count is a bit excessive; maybe multiply it by the number of players times 80%.
3. It should be more obvious when a player is dead and waiting to respawn.
[FIXED] 4. On at least one occasion, players respawned even when everyone died
5. A number of errors in the Unity console that I won't spam you with here.
Hour 45
I -may- have fixed the issue where a player can appear more than once, and added a skull-and-crossbones icon that appears to the left of a player's name when they're dead. I also made a decision knowing it's probably a bad one: I'm going ahead with level 3. I managed to get the background art done, and the camera to follow the player when jumping vertically, and have the player die if they fall off the bottom of the screen.
I'm rather fond of the background art -- I drew it by studying a picture of the grand canyon and just "sketching it."
Hour 46
I finished level 3 sooner than expected; but that's probably because I cut corners to wedge in more time for overall testing. I recycled the same old enemy prefabs and put almost no effort into the boss. It was a pleasantry to see that I could still make it look half-decent with just one "stepping stone" bitmap instead of the several I had planned on drawing. I think this level is the hardest because it has a strong respawning enemy presence. I still haven't been able to beat it solo.
The rest of the time was spent on adding links to the title screen and game-wide testing.
Hour 47
This hour was devoted to bug fixes:
- Extreme slowness after a short while playing
- Players were invincible in level 1
- Mouse cursor invisible in the game menu
- Game won't end if everyone is dead sometimes
- Took out $ from score -- everyone kept asking if they could buy stuff with it
- Increase shotgun range
I also starting working on a bug where you sometimes could not start or join a game.
Here's how my desktop looked for a good portion of this hour:
Hour 48
I spent a lot of this hour fixing the "Sometimes you can start / join a game." bug. I tried to get gamepad integration in as well, but I ran out of time. I might have to turn this into an extended "50 hour" jam.
THE FINAL PRODUCT
Bugs I didn't fix because it was too late
- The PC Version has no way to quit without closing the window
- No gamepad support
- Sometimes you can jump extra high
- Sometimes you can't jump toward a ledge but you can't get through it
- Level 2 Boss Fight: You can respawn in front of the train and not see the boss
- Level 3: When you respawn, the camera doesn't follow you down, so you're pretty much toast if you die.
- Level 3: Sometimes you can't move (got it to happen once)
I could have just settled on two levels with less bugs; but I let the chaos side of me, the "cowboy coder" if you will, make the call. I'm paying the price for it, but you know what, this was all done in good fun. It was a very nice holiday from the usual grind of serious game development.
The end of this blog line?
Nope...I still need to write the post-mortem! Stay tuned!
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