Hiya all, it’s devbloggin’ time! This week we’re gonna talk about fixing stuff.
BUILD PROBLEMS
So this just happened. Risto took off yesterday on the spur of the moment for a trip down South, which left only me and Jukka to make the build today. It was supposed to be a simple “make build, upload, profit” type scenario, but of course Murphy’s law kicked into effect and pretty much everything broke down. Long story short, we just spent close to three hours fixing the build. There’s still one peculiar bug that we couldn’t hunt down yet, but otherwise the build works now.Go check it out!
MONSTER MAYHEM
Not counting the aforementioned, it’s been a relatively quiet week here at the office. Our graphic artist Mikko took the week off to have a well deserved vacation, which meant that we couldn’t focus too much on adding new features (we don’t want to publish “programmer graphics” if we can help it). Before he left though, Mikko got some new monster animations done. Our digging monsters now actually dig! Also, monsters now have a death animation and their bodies stay in the level instead of disappearing. These two additions have a bigger effect than you would realize.
While implementing the dying animations for the monsters, we had an interesting and honestly quite funny bug of “immortal zombie monsters”. If you dropped a bomb near dead monsters, they would suddenly spring back up like zombies and since they didn’t have any health, they were effectively immortal. They would hunt you tirelessly and if you weren’t fast enough, eventually catch you. And then they would feast on your brains! Ok, obviously we didn’t implement such a feature, but it was quite funny nonetheless. Though a little bittersweet, they’re gone now (hopefully).
GET ON MY LEVEL!
As the sole new feature this week, you can advance to the next level instead of resetting the game every time you use the teleporter. At the moment it doesn’t really do much else than carry over your gear, health and juice, but if you want, you can make yourself a godlike killing machine!
DIGGING REVAMP
Risto decided to revamp the digging system this week. In earlier builds you always dug at a set speed: You applied your digging power to all blocks, which meant that your digging speed was the same whether you were digging one, three or five blocks at once (you know, diagonally). Now your digging power is divided equally among the blocks instead. Effectively this means that digging multiple blocks simultaneously is slower than digging fewer. Don’t worry, we also adjusted the players digging speed accordingly.
This new system presented a problem however: diagonal digging. Our digging speed is currently balanced around how long it takes the player to dig sideways (three blocks at once). Diagonal digging however affects five blocks, which effectively almost doubles the time it takes to dig them. The point of the new system was indeed to make diagonal digging slower, but making it almost twice as slow would’ve made gameplay unbearable. Risto fixed the problem easily enough with some special conditions, but we’ll see if the system changes again in the future.
A LOTTA FIXIN’
There was also a ton of bug fixing this week. There were a ton you never even got to see (like the immortal zombies), but the ones you actually benefit from are mostly skill related. You can no longer use skills simultaneously, pistol and bomb actually get more damage from items and so on. The flamethrower still doesn’t get damage boosts, because it’s code is a bit of a mess, but hopefully we’ll have that next week. Read the changelog for more details.
UNITY 5
If you’ve somehow managed to miss this piece of news, here it is: Unity 5 is out! It’s free like always and it actually has some features that used to be in the Pro-version. We haven’t made the transition just yet ourselves. Though unlikely, upgrading to Unity 5 might’ve broken the game and we didn’t want to risk it right now. All of you on the other hand should get it right now!
SUMMARY
So yes, a more quiet week mostly about fixing stuff. That’s what game development often is. Hopefully next week we’ll have some more concrete stuff for you guys since Mikko will be back to make new graphics. Until then, see ya!
