💡 Sunday Devlog 37: Eureka!

Welcome back! This week was a bit of tying up loose ends, but there's also some neat new community-made tech to talk about as well. Let's dive right in!

Functional Achievements!

Roughly a week and a half ago, one of Flowlab's community members who goes by "Rezarg" came out with a tool that he's been cooking up for the past couple of weeks. Basically, any Flowlab game can be activated through this launcher, and with the right configs, it will allow a game to just trigger achievement unlocks.

The really incredible thing about this tool is that it's not built into the engine, and rather uses external tools to relay a message to Steam to unlock achievements for the player. It is one of the first times that third party tools are being integrated into a game outside of the engine supporting it!

It's not really expressed in this screenshot well, but Rezarg got some much-deserved love from the community for pulling this off.

So, naturally, I was extremely eager to test this out. The weird thing with Steam achievements is that unlike other features, you can't have them locked in a beta branch - once you add them, they're rolled out to everyone, immediately.

Therefore, our older game, Envoy, was used as the lab rat for this achievement test. A couple funky bugs were found and fixed along the way, but lo and behold, I managed to get a working achievement in for Envoy through Rezarg's tool. Huzzah!

I was practically jumping out of my seat at the sight of this. As a slight disclaimer, a couple engine updates have made Envoy much more challenging to fully support, so this achievement was only activated on a test branch. It was recalled right after this experiment concluded, lol.

With that, all of the achievements were thrown into Parse-O-Rhythm, and while they aren't available yet (since 1.3 needs to be released first), they're all typed and uploaded into Steamworks, which took a good hour and a half of naming, exporting, naming, assigning, over and over.. for all 31 achievements!

Bugfixing

The other thing that went on this week was bugfixing for the game. While the wonky easing bug (from last devlog) wasn't patched this week, many more bugs relating to slashing, RGB issues on the combo counter, and certain settings not getting applied have been patched, so pausing will be more-or-less done once the easing bug is fixed by the engine developer.

What's Left?

At this point, there are only a couple things left for 1.3: the achievements, pausing, and controller update. These are mainly:

-Making the controller interface with the new menus (easy) -Ironing out everything after the easing bug is fixed (medium) -Adding the code to support the Steam achievements on the game's end (medium)

Truth be told, I've still got a lot on my plate as I return to school. With that said, pretty much all of the super-heavy, time consuming things have been ironed out by this point, so it's safe to say that you can expect an open beta within the next week or two :).

Also! The game will be going on sale again for the Steam Spring Sale, this time for 30% off! This would be a great time to get the game for a friend, invest in it yourself, or maybe even tell others about it :). The sale will last a week and it starts on March 13th, so I hope to see you then.

Thanks for following the dev logs as always! -Encabulated Games