What changed
0 fixes3 additions1 change0 removals
- Gameplay
- Performance
- Events
addedOverall ProgressIf there would be a comparative of "Overall," it would describe the last month pretty well. We worked on everything: story arc logic, story arc relevant assets, game logic, removing legacy code, test automation, and even making builds. April was also our dedicated bug-fixing month, and we found a lot of them. After all, we were pushing really hard into production without any regard for all the duct-tape code we kept to keep the legacy stuff running. An unfortunate side effect is that it didn't produce a lot of cool screenshots we could share, and since we will work on dialogs for the next three months, we may be a bit short on pixels. However, in August, new interns join the team, and both love to work in the art department, and together with them we will spend about four months on nothing but art assets.
addedTAS-Bot/TAT-BotOne of the most time-consuming parts of developing a game is testing. While gameplay testing happens passively as time goes on, doing a full playthrough (especially when you have a long game) eats up a lot of time. Luckily, speedrunning gave us the idea of a Tool-Assisted-Test Bot. We spent two weeks in April developing a testing system that has access to cheat codes and utilizes the content system we already have. It was surprisingly easy to build, and with a few tweaks to waiting times, we can now approximate a full playthrough of all 30 levels in about 1 minute. And the errors we found were many and terrible. We found a memory leak that caused issues with the game only 20 levels in. These errors are very easy to miss because you may find an error after about five levels, stop your run, fix it, and continue with clean memory. From developer to developer: build yourself an automated test system. You don't have to write an AI that plays the game for you. Detonate every object in the world, collect everything in the same frame, and just win the game two frames after the level loaded; if your game survives these stress tests, it will likely survive most players. Except Josh. No game will ever be Josh-proof.
changedFury FridayWe have another small hint for the Unity developers out there. I decided to have a calm Friday and just fix errors when making a build. It is a slow process, very repetitive, but build-only errors tend to be easy to fix. Except the one we had last week. Waifu simply crashed hard. It crashed harder than the Mad Max Disco Truck, and it took me and a friend about six hours to find the culprit: be very careful when you define a C# class or a struct with the System.Serializable attribute and you have editor-only variables (via #if UNITY_EDITOR) in them. Having an array of these appears to increase the risk that your game simply crashes on startup. The log may tell you of a corrupted file. It may also only tell you that something goes wrong with a memcopy. Usually, you get an error message in your builds that Unity expected X serialized bits, but only found Y, and even a hint which class is broken. We are not on the Unity 6 version yet, and it may be possible that crashes are much more unlikely if you are up to date. We are lucky that our minimal builds take only... 15 seconds, and we were able to pinpoint relatively quickly what type of asset caused the error. But if you have a big project where you have to wait 10 minutes for a minimal build, you will have a bad week, a bad month, or even a botched release.
addedGoing ForwardOur current plan is to spend three of the four days writing dialogs. We still have to count how many dialogs we have to write. We estimate that we have to write about 135 dialog files. That will include all story dialog events and all basic dialogs with the waifus, including different "base moods" if you go for a good or evil run. We have nine major story arcs, and five of them can use the "happy mood." Two would require the "bad mood," and the remaining two are odd. We'll let you know when we finish all of these and look at how much time will be left to add smaller dialogs. We still want to have plenty of waifu activities in the house and other things. Maybe the confectionery waifu gives you actual cake recipes. All of these are nice-to-have; the whipped cream on top, and we still need to bake the actual cake.
Get Your Tentacles Off My Waifu! changes
addedIf there would be a comparative of "Overall," it would describe the last month pretty well. We worked on everything: story arc logic, story arc relevant assets, game logic, removing legacy code, test automation, and even making builds. April was also our dedicated bug-fixing month, and we found a lot of them. After all, we were pushing really hard into production without any regard for all the duct-tape code we kept to keep the legacy stuff running. An unfortunate side effect is that it didn't produce a lot of cool screenshots we could share, and since we will work on dialogs for the next three months, we may be a bit short on pixels. However, in August, new interns join the team, and both love to work in the art department, and together with them we will spend about four months on nothing but art assets.
addedOne of the most time-consuming parts of developing a game is testing. While gameplay testing happens passively as time goes on, doing a full playthrough (especially when you have a long game) eats up a lot of time. Luckily, speedrunning gave us the idea of a Tool-Assisted-Test Bot. We spent two weeks in April developing a testing system that has access to cheat codes and utilizes the content system we already have. It was surprisingly easy to build, and with a few tweaks to waiting times, we can now approximate a full playthrough of all 30 levels in about 1 minute. And the errors we found were many and terrible. We found a memory leak that caused issues with the game only 20 levels in. These errors are very easy to miss because you may find an error after about five levels, stop your run, fix it, and continue with clean memory. From developer to developer: build yourself an automated test system. You don't have to write an AI that plays the game for you. Detonate every object in the world, collect everything in the same frame, and just win the game two frames after the level loaded; if your game survives these stress tests, it will likely survive most players. Except Josh. No game will ever be Josh-proof.
changedWe have another small hint for the Unity developers out there. I decided to have a calm Friday and just fix errors when making a build. It is a slow process, very repetitive, but build-only errors tend to be easy to fix. Except the one we had last week. Waifu simply crashed hard. It crashed harder than the Mad Max Disco Truck, and it took me and a friend about six hours to find the culprit: be very careful when you define a C# class or a struct with the System.Serializable attribute and you have editor-only variables (via #if UNITY_EDITOR) in them. Having an array of these appears to increase the risk that your game simply crashes on startup. The log may tell you of a corrupted file. It may also only tell you that something goes wrong with a memcopy. Usually, you get an error message in your builds that Unity expected X serialized bits, but only found Y, and even a hint which class is broken. We are not on the Unity 6 version yet, and it may be possible that crashes are much more unlikely if you are up to date. We are lucky that our minimal builds take only... 15 seconds, and we were able to pinpoint relatively quickly what type of asset caused the error. But if you have a big project where you have to wait 10 minutes for a minimal build, you will have a bad week, a bad month, or even a botched release.
addedOur current plan is to spend three of the four days writing dialogs. We still have to count how many dialogs we have to write. We estimate that we have to write about 135 dialog files. That will include all story dialog events and all basic dialogs with the waifus, including different "base moods" if you go for a good or evil run. We have nine major story arcs, and five of them can use the "happy mood." Two would require the "bad mood," and the remaining two are odd. We'll let you know when we finish all of these and look at how much time will be left to add smaller dialogs. We still want to have plenty of waifu activities in the house and other things. Maybe the confectionery waifu gives you actual cake recipes. All of these are nice-to-have; the whipped cream on top, and we still need to bake the actual cake.
Hey guys - Dev here
First I have to apologize that I didn't post a weekly development update last week. The migraine goblin struck, but he is pacified again and will likely rest for another six months. So let's move on to what generally happened last month and how things will go forward.
Overall Progress
If there would be a comparative of "Overall," it would describe the last month pretty well. We worked on everything: story arc logic, story arc relevant assets, game logic, removing legacy code, test automation, and even making builds. April was also our dedicated bug-fixing month, and we found a lot of them. After all, we were pushing really hard into production without any regard for all the duct-tape code we kept to keep the legacy stuff running. An unfortunate side effect is that it didn't produce a lot of cool screenshots we could share, and since we will work on dialogs for the next three months, we may be a bit short on pixels. However, in August, new interns join the team, and both love to work in the art department, and together with them we will spend about four months on nothing but art assets.
TAS-Bot/TAT-Bot
One of the most time-consuming parts of developing a game is testing. While gameplay testing happens passively as time goes on, doing a full playthrough (especially when you have a long game) eats up a lot of time. Luckily, speedrunning gave us the idea of a Tool-Assisted-Test Bot. We spent two weeks in April developing a testing system that has access to cheat codes and utilizes the content system we already have. It was surprisingly easy to build, and with a few tweaks to waiting times, we can now approximate a full playthrough of all 30 levels in about 1 minute. And the errors we found were many and terrible. We found a memory leak that caused issues with the game only 20 levels in. These errors are very easy to miss because you may find an error after about five levels, stop your run, fix it, and continue with clean memory. From developer to developer: build yourself an automated test system. You don't have to write an AI that plays the game for you. Detonate every object in the world, collect everything in the same frame, and just win the game two frames after the level loaded; if your game survives these stress tests, it will likely survive most players. Except Josh. No game will ever be Josh-proof.
Fury Friday
We have another small hint for the Unity developers out there. I decided to have a calm Friday and just fix errors when making a build. It is a slow process, very repetitive, but build-only errors tend to be easy to fix. Except the one we had last week. Waifu simply crashed hard. It crashed harder than the Mad Max Disco Truck, and it took me and a friend about six hours to find the culprit: be very careful when you define a C# class or a struct with the System.Serializable attribute and you have editor-only variables (via #if UNITY_EDITOR) in them. Having an array of these appears to increase the risk that your game simply crashes on startup. The log may tell you of a corrupted file. It may also only tell you that something goes wrong with a memcopy. Usually, you get an error message in your builds that Unity expected X serialized bits, but only found Y, and even a hint which class is broken. We are not on the Unity 6 version yet, and it may be possible that crashes are much more unlikely if you are up to date. We are lucky that our minimal builds take only... 15 seconds, and we were able to pinpoint relatively quickly what type of asset caused the error. But if you have a big project where you have to wait 10 minutes for a minimal build, you will have a bad week, a bad month, or even a botched release.
Going Forward
Our current plan is to spend three of the four days writing dialogs. We still have to count how many dialogs we have to write. We estimate that we have to write about 135 dialog files. That will include all story dialog events and all basic dialogs with the waifus, including different "base moods" if you go for a good or evil run. We have nine major story arcs, and five of them can use the "happy mood." Two would require the "bad mood," and the remaining two are odd. We'll let you know when we finish all of these and look at how much time will be left to add smaller dialogs. We still want to have plenty of waifu activities in the house and other things. Maybe the confectionery waifu gives you actual cake recipes. All of these are nice-to-have; the whipped cream on top, and we still need to bake the actual cake.
That's all from us. See ya again in about a month, and until then - Have Fun
