Dev Diary - 6 Feb

26 JAN 2021

Doing a bit of work on a universal cutscene script. So far, you can call on it to freeze everything going on in current play, stop the player from moving, and adjust cameras. I got it working just how I like it, so next up will be actually making the cutscenes utilizing this fancy technology!

2 FEB 2021

Multiple fairly big weekends, including the global game jam, ate up a lot of time, and I wasn't able to get much done on Pilfered liberty for the duration. However, I’m back and on track and ready to get to work!

Today, I am starting to finally add in the final boss cutscenes. So far I only have the intro, but I want to make sure every single scene look great, because there’s only going to be two or three and therefore they need to not only feel natural, but they need to convey a message without distracting the player. One important thing I needed to add was the ability to skip cutscenes for players who don’t want to see it. This is done by having a message appear asking if the player wants to skip, and subsequent presses will skip the cutscene. The whole thing has a brief pause before it accepts input, because chances are the player was button mashing before getting to the cutscene, and I didn’t want them clicking through it too fast.

3 FEB 2021

The dreaded day has finally come. As I progressively get better as a developer, I recognize some of the corners I painted myself into with my original coding and design, and often try to overlook it. I’m so close to the finish line that I keep telling myself it’s not worth fixing now, just learn for next time.

Well, while making the cutscenes, I realized being able to manipulate the audio would be really helpful.. But past me decided audio was so overwhelmingly untouchable that adding even the slightest functionality broke the entire game. Not smart.

So, today and.. Likely the rest of the week is going to be spent refactoring everything about the menus and audio systems to make them MUCH easier to work with, as well as giving players more active control over the audio. Rather than just an “on/off” button, they will have adjustable sliders, which honestly should have been the case all along. This is going to take forever, but it’s a good lesson in not spaghetti coding..

4 FEB 2021

Still nothing incredibly exciting to mention. The work going into refactoring is just taking a bit of time, but it’ll be worth it once it is done. There isn’t much to update on the changelog or in a journal, because all I can mostly say is that I’m happy to upgrade the relatively ancient programming this game was employing, and I hopefully won’t have to do something like this again in the future.

One curiosity is that if I was to make this game controller accessible, will Steam handle the integration? I’ve read somewhere that you can purchase a program that recognizes which remote is plugged in, but I’m not sure how that would even work. For now, once I do that, I think I’ll only add PS4 controller support until I can find a better way.