August 9 -13: Lots of Playtesting!

All of my Tomorrows » Devlog

3 years ago by opalizardstudios (@opalizard)

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August 9
- Am tired. Just going to struggle through the last 1.15 hours I have left of this morning before work.
- Trying to troubleshoot some sound issues - I want to give the players the ability to turn on/off certain sounds at their discretion, and unfortunately, the way I've handled sound in the game thus far means I may have to completely redo all the sound/music/ambience handlers that I have throughout the Flowchart, because Fungus has not allowed us (at least, not in an obvious way) to chose what Audio Mixer those sounds can be assigned to with their own audio scripts. I've tried editing the Fungus scripts to include a script that allows me to assign a mixer group but I've only been met with errors at this point so I'm trying to decide what would be the easiest. I'll play around with this today until I achieve the best option or find a solution.
- I ended up finding a solution with the audio mixer groups. It's not exactly clear or laid out on how to assign different children from the master group to a sound clip but with lots of troubleshooting and a few tutorials, it's been done. There is currently a mixer group for ambience & sound effects (combined as one to save time), and one for music, so that they can be controlled independently. I'm working to see if I can do one for voices too, however at this point in time, I likely will not be able to, so voices will likely be stuck at the same volume regardless.
- Ehhh, couldn't find an effective workaround for controlling the voice volume, so the voices will be there, regardless. That sucks. As much credit as I give Fungus, they really fall short in a lot of ways that aren't very easy to circumvent on your own.
- Got the sliders working for music and SFX volume. I should have the code working fine for resolution and full screen changes as well. All that's left is some final touches and... I might actually be finished this before I expected to be. It's nice when a plan unexpectedly comes together by way of beautifully wrapped parcel.
- I decided for the rest of the night I was going to do proof-reading to get that out of the way. I do need to make additional tweaks to voice lines and ambience tracks and then should be able to do a full run through of the game. Based on my estimates, a normal play through would take about 1-2 hours, based on how fast a reader you are. I'm pretty happy with that. I didn't set out to make the most amazing, longest VN ever, I just wanted to work with the idea I had, and I like what it's turned into. :D
- I'M EDITING SOME OF THE AMBIENCE FILES AND AUDIO MIXERS AND THE AMOUNT OF TIMES I'VE ALMOST BLOWN OUT MY HEADPHONES IS MORE TIMES THAN YOU'LL EVER BE ABLE TO GET ME TO ADMIT TO.
August 10
- I only got about 1/3 through proof-reading last night. So that resumes this morning. I have a peach juice box and I'm ready to roll.
- I hurt my fingers today. I have a habit of cracking my knuckles too much when I'm absent minded, so I managed to really hurt one of my fingers today. My middle and ring finger on my dominant hand are taped together for the time being, which doesn't hinder my mouse usage, but it takes me twice the time to type. Bleh.
- Did the first build of the game officially and will likely spend the next little bit troubleshooting any issues and making notes of anything to add or change. Ooooooooh. Excited!
August 11
- I've spent the majority of the day trying to troubleshoot resolution issues with the build. I'm not sure why Unity has such huge problems with this but it seems to have always been an issue, so I'm trying to circumvent that haha. Whenever the options menu opens, it automatically resets the resolution. Really that's just a problem with the script being called only when the options menu is set to active, so that's a minor change. But there are... other problems.
- The build otherwise is great aside from small tweaks. It really does take a lot of time to refine these kinds of things, and it's tedious, but it's so nice when it all comes together!
August 12
- A wild Thursday appeared! More play testing today.
- I've actually learned new things with this game jam that I'll be using to fix a few things with my main project Rainbow Heartbeats. Like volume controls and how I need to do it with Fungus, as well as accessing the menu and fiddling with resolution. Once I'm done with AOMT I'll probably move on to make similar changes to RH before I forget them. RH is only about 1/5 complete, and the things I'd be changing are mostly aesthetic and option based - but I'd rather do it now than forget about it and not remember how to do it 6 months from now haha. It's actually really good that I know what I need to do before I move much further with Rainbow Heartbeats, because I wouldn't have known it was a problem until I tried to build the game, and it's nowhere near build-ready. Adjusting it wouldn't take much, but it would be a full day or two of work.
August 13
- Ooh. Friday the 13th.
- Moooore play testing. It's taking me so long because, don't forget, I have a day job. And the amount of focus required to ensure I'm not missing anything is difficult to maintain when I get a call every 5 minutes, so often times I won't do anything with the game for a few hours, especially when it's busy.
- The "sky" section of this game has so many problems. I don't know what was going on when I did the programming but oh my god I'm constantly pausing the play test to fix something and then starting it up again to go through it all again haha.
- Interestingly enough, the Fungus save system will save your game even in Unity's playtest mode, so that's led for some pretty confusing playtest startups.
- I went through and redid some audio because some was too loud, some was not loud enough, and some was all over the place. Danny's lines ranged from being just loud enough to being too loud. Equalizing is not my forte, but I will have it as close to reasonable as possible!
- Not sure how much work I'll get done tomorrow, I'm goin' on a hot date and then I'm on call all weekend! Yay....