Hello everyone!
Stefano here, writing about yet another update!
Not too much going on this week on the "new features" aspect of the development but a lot of stuff was changed behind the scenes. In fact I took a whole week to deeply test and debug all the features that were added in the past weeks to be sure enough that the game until now is stable. I didn't wanted to record boring debugging session because I thought that the finally timelapse would have been too messy and not very comprehensible, this is why I only uploaded one art timelapse this week and here it is:
As always, here is the changelog too:
Complete testing and debugging
This is what took the major part of this week. Every features is tested when it's added to the game, but even the smallest change somewhere in the code could lead to a crash somewhere else where you don't expect that, so it's always a good thing to stop the development process for a bit and just focus on testing and make sure that everything is ok before making it even more complex and messy. Here is the main test I ran (obviously they were not all "ok" in the first run of the test, I marked them "ok" only after I fixed them):
I also took advantage of the save system through the serialization of the game objects to take snapshots of the states of the game objects in various situation, and then I compared those snapshots in a diff checking program to see if there were unexpected differences. These were the test I did with this method:
Improved Save and Load functions
One thing that it has been a bit of a pain to deal with is the save system. Before it worked all nice and correctly when the scene was static, but it didn't support scenes where guys were working on something because orders serialization was not implemented yet. Now after a bit of spaghetti code later it all work nicely even with complex scenes and guys working on multiple things.
New Sprites
Even if it was debugging week I still had a lot of images to do since last week I added many new objects to the game. So I took some time to do the continuous caster sprite, the roller machine sprite, and the rod sprite. I also finally decided that the majority of the game's sprites will be full top down (except some few special sprites like guys) because I like that style more, so I may have to redo some sprite to fit that style better.
Keep in touch
If you are curious to see how things will go feel free click any of these links to join our community:
Discord Server: Discord.gg
YouTube channel for Timelapses: Youtube.com
Twitter: Twitter.com
Changelog: Docs.google.com
