Weekly Dev Update – May 6th 2016

Adam

Hey everybody!

With the work that was done to overhaul character and section highlighting, one of my objectives this week was to convert some of the desk interaction to use the same approach. The object contours made for much cleaner highlighting of objects we interact with and the shared raycasting eliminated a bunch of bugs with object selection. This is still a work-in-progress, but the initial integration has already shown promise.

Funny story with this: you’ve probably seen in past screenshots of the desk that we have trinkets on there. With the new object interaction, we finally were able to click on the bobblehead to get it a-bobbling. It was so satisfying that every time I launched the game to test something on the desk, I inevitably found myself furiously bobbling the bobblehead. This is probably a good indication of the immersive quality of having an in-game workspace like that. ( or that Adam’s brain has finally merged with his cat’s — Max )

Finally, I spent some time catching up on bug-squashing. While it’s important to meet milestone obligations by knocking out those big features you’re aiming for, it’s also important to keep the game in a stable, playable state. Otherwise, you jeopardize the team’s ability to comfortably playtest areas of the game. Not only is this important for finding bugs and coming up with usability improvements, but it’s also a big factor for motivation. It’s easy to lose sight of what you’re building when you can’t just boot it up and mess around with it sometimes.

See you next week!

Daniel

Hi Everybody!

This week I got around to fixing the scale of tables, chairs, benches, etc. Getting the scale right when you start is important, otherwise like i just did you’ll end up needing to do a bunch of additional work to address the issues when you run into a situation where the problems become very obvious.

I had some time to make a prototype script to start organizing section light so that in the future we can turn on/off lights in a nice way, change from normal lights to emergency lights, and so on. Once we get that fully integrated, it will make life feel much more dynamic aboard the Astrobase.

Towards the end of the week I worked on a couple of sections. Neither of them are 100% finished yet but I should have something to show next week.

Dave

Hey everybody! Last week I started on the new word bank for the procedurally generated stories. All the older data that is in the storygen system — traits, words, etc were developed side-by-side with the system itself, and it was trying to hit a moving target (an in-development experimental feature). Now that the system itself is finalized (and working great!), we can make far better designed data since we know what the system looks like. This is where we are at now.

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Weekly Dev Update - April 29th, 2016
Weekly Dev Update – May 20th, 2016
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