The Only Good Bug is a Fixed Bug

This week's been mostly about finding and squashing bugs, of which there are plenty. Luckily for us, Mihai has got a pretty big boot with a hard sole.

Metaphor's aside, he's been doing fantastic work at quickly finding ways to deal with the weird stuff that tends to crop up in the game, as well as giving time to making a couple of adjustments to other issues. Meanwhile, Murilo continues to slog away at getting those animations ready for use.

Here's the main bugs we've been working on this week:

• Enemy's. Just about everything about them needs to be tweaked, but nothing more so than their ridiculous, moonwalking, badly aligned, floating appearance. 
• Not exactly a bug, but the jumping needs to be a little more forgiving. Mihai's added some code that will allow the player to jump just a fraction of a second after Sprout's feet have left the platform.
• Respawn. Currently, as the player dies on a layer other than the one where he spawned, he respawns on the layer of death. Usually, there is no platform there, which means he will die forever by continuously fallingspawningfallingspawningfallingspawning

There's others, but we'll focus on talking about them. As for enemy's you can see most of the problems with them (there are many) in this video: 

The preview image there shows some pretty offensive floating. This is occurring for several reasons, none of which have anything to do with Mihai's work. The biggest problem is trying to get a collision box that fits the enemy shape and cooperates with movement. The second problem is that we haven't quite got the animations and model perfected for use, yet, though we are close. 

The jumping issue is kind of impossible to show an example of. Basically, I decided early on that if I ever find myself testing the game and getting frustrated, then I need to undo or fix whatever the cause of the frustration is. Sometimes it's okay, but rarely, and only when it is completely by design. Falling into pits that should be easy to jump over is not a fun experience. I also read on this article that forgiving jumps are practically expected.

Mihai's put some seriously brainscratching work into this issue and managed to come up with a system that does exactly what we were hoping for. No more yelling at my computer screen!

The respawn bug is pretty much already fixed, though its possible that some new and somewhat related issues have reared their ugly heads. I need to do some more testing to be sure, and also to make sure I know exactly what was done to cause the issue.

Also this week, I've been experimenting with the Unity terrain feature to try and temporarily fill in the background, because it's just far too clumsy and unimpressive looking with nothing. After Murilo's finished up the animations work, he'll be able to move on to what is essentially the demo's final aesthetic need: going over the level and making it pretty the way only someone like he can do.

Also added some final jump puzzles to end of the level so the thing is technically playable now.

In the above, I show you that it's way easier to cover up imperfections with the lights off! Woo! As for that box, that's gonna be redone into something magical-looking, too. Just you wait!

Til next time!

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