DevBlog #22

Filipe - Lead Programmer

Hey everyone, this month I spent the majority of my time on two things. Firstly, a small patch contains an enormous amount of bug fixes. Many of those bugs caused issues to various basic interaction mechanics such as eating, drinking, as well as inconsistencies in certain abilities. Then I’ve also been working on the Skin System which is slated to debut as part of Update #5, which is going great, but we’re still testing and deciding ways to grant players the most amount of customization options without causing unexpected results.

Lastly I’ve also dedicated some time to a Music Manager system, which should be integrated as part of the soon-to-be deployed as part of the small patch. Keep in mind that it will still be changed in the near future, so the system itself will improve and have different outcomes as we move forward in development.

dmIV - Programmer

I’ve spent much of the month working on Update #5’s nesting mechanic. There will be at least two types in the update. Mound nests are easier to construct, but require more maintenance once you are incubating the eggs. Debris nests are constructed from materials you will have to find, but they keep the eggs warm for you. I feel like that ended up being a fun little mini game. I had various other tasks related to them like saving or setting up a UI indicator too.

Naturally we always have bugs to fix and balance changes to make, you’ll learn more about that in Hypno’s post somewhere further down the blog. I also ended up making some significant changes to the charge mechanic in the background. You should be able to hit your targets more reliably from now on.

Hypno - QA Lead

Around the end of last month I had been working with some of QA to streamline our bug testing processes, more specifically how we approach our “adhoc” testing. For those unfamiliar with this process, it is the act of testing something without much planning to see if any defects have appeared with each build. Before the changes, we were doing more work than what is necessary, which resulted in the process taking longer than it should have. This issue has since been resolved as we now have an “intended behavior” section that each tester can simply mark whether the behavior ingame matches what we have on the sheet. Adhoc testing is now a much simpler process and has allowed us to cover a lot more ground on bugs, so hopefully the change should reflect in the quality of the upcoming patch.

The above is just a glimpse into the many sheets that we cover in QA, specifically how meat chunks can be interacted with. To cover from the left-most column to the right, we start with a query (e.g. what happens if I “Try to grab more than one meat chunk”?). We compare the results of the query ingame to the intended behavior on the sheet. If it’s working as intended, we mark the query green, if it has a defect then the query is marked red. We open a report on our internal issue tracker, link it to the sheet and then update the “Last Version Checked”. This process has to be repeated for every mechanic, for every species in the game and kept up-to-date as much as possible, due to changes/bug fixes causing unforeseen circumstances - even things that you would typically think are unrelated can break each other! Just because a mechanic works