Post Demo Breakdown (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

A huge thank-you to my patrons, your support has been amazing!
All your positive responses gives me energy. I'll admit I got a little exhausted on this latest one. But I'm really happy I got the demo out and managed to track down a bunch of bugs.
Now that it's out I'm feeling much more positive.  

With the demo out I'm going to take a short break. I'll take the weekend to relax and early next week to just tie up the loose ends and start researching some new technologies I want to put into the project. I'll do a very quick devlog and give you an idea on my next plans.

I've been going through some of the bugs and doing a little bit of sleuthing.

-Can't talk to some characters (Try standing further back for the moment)

This is a fault of mine in the interaction code. In short it projects a sphere outwards from around your belly. That sphere registers anything it hit along the way. But if the object started within the sphere it won't detect that object. So anything right against the player will not register. 

There are a couple solutions but the biggest will be to create a popup over anything when you can select it. That way you will know when you can select something. I'll also create a backup system to detect very close objects.

-Falling out of the level

This was just carelessness on my part. In order to have multiple levels with stairs I needed to remove some walls. But I had to manually plug the holes. The obvious answer is I can't leave this up to myself. I'll have to create an automated system to block edges. This shouldn't be too hard.

-AI Pathing

This is a combo, so the AI use the same method to see if objects are in front of them as the player. So anything really close or in the wrong position can seem invisible to them.

Also the AI is designed to turn off if you get too far away. If you walk away at the wrong time the AI can be left walking in one direction. This should be pretty easy to fix.

-The big inventory bug

SO most people won't have even noticed this one but right before release I discovered a crippling bug. A bug that only occurs in full final builds of the game.

It's pretty complicated but some people might find it interesting.
So the inventory uses objects like "Can of Drink". This is classed as an "Item". All inventory objects are "items". They contain things like the image in your inventory and any special effects or textures.

So the "diaper" item contains the diaper texture along with information about what type of diaper. When you put it on and use it it is swapped out for a "Dirty" version which is a different item.

When swapping/stacking or "Paying" for items the system checks to see if the "items" are the same, or different ext. A very simple operation.... or so I thought.

When your running the .exe however, I load items into your inventory and load your customised appearance. This only loads the item you need. The side effect of this is that to the computer the two "Items" loaded in different ways will register as being completely different.

So I'm going to go back and re-work some of the inventory code. It's not as bad as I originally thought, but having had to solve this bug I found a much better way to store/save items.

The good news

There is good news tho, the triggering systems and interactions were much smoother, and I'm now happy with the AI node/event systems. I can say they should be pretty finalised. I'm also getting much happier with player movement and AI movement. It's not perfect but it does everything I think I'm going to need to.

I'm going to start planning out the next ramp up. This project is going pretty well and I'm going to keep doing what I can to make sure it goes great!