Jesse Lozano

How has the Month been for Stillness –

Actually, February was pretty alright in terms of work for Stillness went. a lot on the art side, polishing up the intro, and by a technical extension, the first level as well. Also got a handful of systems refactored, working out some month old bugs, because those are always easy motivational targets for working on.

What I said I would do (and did it get done) –

• Playtest (sorta, actually)
• Polish Level 1 and Intro (again, sorta)
• Stretch Goals: (haha no to all of them)
  • Finish level 2
  • Start level 3
  • Mock up more conversations scenes
  • Paper prototype the emotional control mini-games.

What got done-

as I said, a lot of art, especially the special pieces for the intro got done. here, is in fact one of them now!

 

(spoilers for the first 2 minutes of the game. :P)

You may not it is a real big picture, and rather empty, but that is because I use it on top of a handful of cool camera techniques, moving around, zooming it in and out. a lot of cool tricks, so a lot of the picture is not seen from this view in game.

Speaking of that, I also refactored and added some stuff to how I can move the camera around. mostly stuff for cutscene use, but with some strong applicable functionality.

to add to that, I also wrote up some basic animators for Stillness. before this, I was using Unity’s built in animation system, which is really powerful, but meant for stuff like 3D animations, and is a lot of overhead, if I want to add some simple sprite animations. so, I added a simple system for those simple cases, letting me create those animations easily, and only use Unity’s animator in cases where it’ll be useful to have that high control (like the player controller).

Another system I decided to up and refactor was the thought system. previously, a thought on screen was the full text of it, just kinda there, on screen, and clicking it kind of required me, behind the scene’s doing a bunch of checks, to prevent the player from moving. overall, rather poor UX. so I decided to overhaul it, to be something like this:

now, thoughts appears as little hovering balls of emotion (colored to match each moods attached color) and when hovered over, shows off the thoughts text. also, I made it so a thought is collected by right clicking, rather than left clicking, avoiding the whole behind the scene’s checks for movement.

movement itself was also refactored, decoupling the notice system I had from it. now the notice system is old. one of the oldest systems in the game, and was pretty tightly connected to player movement, as well as the player’s ability to investigate things. so decoupling, and streamlining things for that was actually more of a challenge than I had anticipated, though it got done as well.

on editor improvements (gotta make my life easier) I finally tackled an issue of autocomplete. see, Stillness requires a lot of info in lists to be tagged with specific names, and those names needing to be refereed to elsewhere in editor for modular use. Events, for instance. and, when you have what is basically an enum of events that is super massive, it can be a pain to navigate. so, I looked into my google-fu powers, to see if anyone else has done just that, and if it is available for use. And luckily, I did! so, shout-out to Clone Factor (http://www.clonefactor.com/wordpress/program/c/1809/) for they sweet autocomplete editor extension! With their editor extension, and a few quick fixes in the code for some weird unity glitches, I was good to go on that part.

And while I’m giving out shout-outs to peeps, my Friend Alex Dejardin, for his assistance making Stillness super pretty with all his graphics wizardry (and also just being the guy I can get to troubleshoot when something super tech-y flies at my face).

lastly (or at least, last I recall), I finally got around to fixing the minor glitches with autotyping. basically, it did not play well with rich text, causing weird pauses, incorrect delays, and making the sfx go off wildly off cue from what was on screen. and that was a whole saga of me tweaking it over the month, getting it to work good. but it does now! I even refactored how the delay command for mid-text delay’s work, to act as seconds, rather than as characters per seconds. (previously delay of 2 would mean 2 character per second for one character, rather than just pausing for 2 seconds, which was very unintuitive from my end, so that’s fixed now).

Oh, and I technically got some playtesting in, in that I showed off the intro to people (because I wanted to show off the improvements I had made), and got feedback for how the intro flows, so that’s good!.

Time Spent –

• Art work – 10 hours total (approx.)
• camera zoom refactor – 2 hours
• translation object refactor – 2 hours
• simple animation system – 1 hour
• thought object refactor – 4 hours
• notice system refactor – 5 hours

What to do next-

I want playtesting, and polishing the opening level/intro to be the next priority, so it is!

I am, overall, in a refactor and improve the game’s UX sort of mood, so thats going to be where focus goes next. that means, yes, playtesting, as well as just combing level 1 for bugs and soft locks.

also maybe polish up the UI? who knows, perhaps thats where my mood will take me.

so, in list form:

• Playtest
• Polish Level 1
• UI polishing?
• Stretch:
  • Finish level 2
  • Start level 3
  • Mock up more conversations scenes
  • Paper prototype the emotional control mini-games.

Closing Notes-

poor footing for a new year = nothing new in my life! 😛

how bout you? :3