Dev Diary: A Week In The Life Of Jérémie (Patreon)

Good Friday everybody! Jérémie here - as you might’ve surmised! This week, I’ll be happy to give you a look at everything I did during the past five days so you have a better idea of what it’s like being in my shoes; The kind of tasks I do, the challenges I face, and maybe some insight on things I’ve been working on! As you might know, I’m a programmer, game designer, but I also help with other things when needed. This post is for patrons only, so please don’t share it! :D

By the way, last week’s different conifer was #4! It was a White Spruce, also known as a Canadian Spruce! All the other trees were Serbian Spruces! This fooled 90% of you! Aha :)

Day One - At The Office

Starting my day, as I do, by answering community messages on Patreon and other social media platforms - while we’re in the recruitment process to hire a new community manager, I’m doing some of that work! Don’t hesitate to ask any questions there if you have them, I might be the one answering them!

I then tried to troubleshoot some issues with my work computer; it will take more time, so I’ll try again in a few more days.

I’m currently working on a few features and tools, one of them is related to improving our tools to customize and color items, floors and ceilings. It’s something that is very much needed because the amazing work our artists have done on artstyle tests is ready to be integrated into the main game, so I wrote a bit about that. Then, I had a meeting with Anna about designs related to properly animating movement and making sure our interactions worked well with characters of different heights.

My test on having characters of different heights sit on the same chair in a way that makes sense.

Lunch came after that, we played some Mario Kart together! I always pick Waluigi, he’s a funny guy.

I’m not that great at Mario Kart but I do love playing it!

Tuesday afternoons are packed with meetings, so we talked the rest of the day away. We discussed  our planning for the rest of this year, specific goals we wanted to hit and how to get there. Finally we talked again about some of my plans for new features and tools and we agreed on what to do for one of the features, so I’ll get on implementing that one in the upcoming days!

Day Two - From Home

Answered community messages again, there are some great questions and ideas out there! First order of business for today was to fix some bugs that were discovered yesterday by Sonia; certain Paramaker sliders are being applied on a character’s body when we don’t want them to and an issue with skin textures appeared after we did a tweak to optimize them. I think I did pretty well with fixing both of these problems!

Wednesdays are my focus days, i.e. I stay away from most online distractions (sorry, Discord-goers!) and really drill down on one specific - usually technical or complicated in some way - issue for the whole day. Today is about adding new features to build mode furniture and items to allow them to better support things like characters sitting down on a couch you’ve resized. We already had some basic code in for that, but after yesterday’s meeting - remember that approved design I talked about? - I can start coding away the next version! Tasks like these can easily take me a whole day to get basic functionality in, things can get pretty complex (as it is the case today).

My working-from-home colleague, Tofu

During my lunch breaks when I’m at home, I love to go for a walk in my neighborhood. I’m pretty lucky to have a bunch of small shops like bakeries and restaurants around! I’d love to have a bakery in our initial town in Paralives :)

I had most of my code written and it seems like it worked as it should, so I added a few quality-of-life features that will be very useful for ourselves and modders (like being able to have a dropdown menu with items in them instead of needing to type a long series of number, or improving performance in the Item Editor). I finished my day with a small meeting with Étienne about his progress on a feature he added to the character creator recently, allowing a wider range of accessories and items to be worn by our characters!

Day Three - From Home (Again!)

Not a lot of questions this morning, but I did answer a message about gradual aging! That’s a topic that comes up often, haha. First things first, I said hello on Discord - I’m usually in the #developers channel! I did a few tweaks on Étienne’s system that we talked about yesterday, then had a last round of tests on all the features I worked on.

This backpack is but a humble test for a new feature I worked on today. We can’t confirm yet if we’ll be able to have backpacks in the game but this new feature might help support them.

I found a bug by doing that extra testing, where more complex items wouldn’t function very well. It was a small coding mistake, sometimes it takes quite a while to find these out!  Alongside all of that, I discussed a bit with Alex and Anna about our planning for upcoming social media posts. Fun stuff is a-brewing!

The other thing I wanted to do today was to start designing improvements to our wall and floor system. In order to get everything working much better with characters and items, we need to rethink some of our code structure. This might take a few days of work, but I’m only starting with bits and pieces for now.

Day Four - At The Office (Special)

I’m usually not at the office on Fridays, but today is Javi’s last day as our intern, so we’re throwing a small farewell party for her - I just had to be here! There were a bunch of questions and suggestions to go through this morning, so I did that while eating a kiwifruit.

What my desk looks like. Not too messy, right?

Finishing my design on improvements to our swatch system was the first order of business of the day. Although I’ve written a chunky document explaining my ideas and how I got there, it’ll have to get reviewed by Alex and Anna, then by the whole team, before I can start implementing it. During the writing of my design document, I randomly found a very tiny bug with our mirrors, so I fixed it! Today was also Patreon Post day, so I took a few minutes to chat with people in the #patron channel before my lunch break.

In the afternoon, I had a meeting with Alex, Anna and Alice to talk about character locomotion and live mode character animations. I have a few more tweaks to give to my design document, so I’ll do that next week. Then, I took the last hour and a half of my day to try and troubleshoot the computer issue I talked about on Tuesday. I really wanna get it fixed!

Sometimes, computers are like that

Day Five - From Home

Here’s the last day of this special feature Patreon post! You might be wondering why this covers from Tuesday to Tuesday, but that’s because it leaves us a few more days to make edits and tweaks to our Patreon post before publishing it on Friday! You probably guessed it, but I start my week by going through all the messages and comments we’ve got and answer them! Some really good suggestions today! :)

I started by fixing a small bug where the thumbnail for the first item in the build mode catalog wouldn’t get properly generated. Then, planning my tasks for the next two weeks! The big chunk of my day today is going to be about the tweaks to my design document about character locomotion and animations. I started working on that, but Léa found a few weird bugs related to holes appearing in character’s faces so I just had to investigate them!

That shouldn’t be here, what happened?

During the afternoon, I had a meeting with Alex to talk about more upgrades to our item editor, a module in our modding tools to integrate new objects and furniture into the game. We continued going through my list of proposed improvements, discussed them all, assigned them priority (if we had to do these improvements soon, or later) and thought of new ones. There’s always so much to do, and new ideas to figure out!

I love my job :D

Jérémie out!