This is part 5 of the Christmas 2022 Jame Gam post mortem, if you haven't already read the first 4 days, I recommend you do before reading on.

The Day

The Morning:

The morning was extremely productive, to say the least. I started the morning on a good note, my audio guy delivered tracks for the main menu as well as the main game and they sounded awesome, right from the start. I took the tracks and quickly dropped them into my MusicBox component and the rest is handled for me. It was then time to work on some bugs.

There were a few sprite render ordering problems between the rogue elves, player and some of the decorations. This should be a simple fix except that the sprite is not a single sprite. Pedro (artist) uses Photoshop and with that he can import a single sprite into the sprite editor as separate pieces. This is GREAT for rigging and animating but a bitch when it comes to sprite ordering as each piece has their own order in the layer. I ended up kind of hacking a fix in for this, I quickly wrote a "multipart sprite sorting" script that simply takes an integer, and uses this as the base of all sprites before they add their own order number.

There were a mess of other minor bugs that needed to be fixed such as, rogues could walk backwards, you didn't actually hold resources that you were delivering, rogues didn't hold resources at all after stealing them etc, etc.

I finished the morning off with the most important task that needed to be done....balancing the game. After many play throughs and tweaking a whack of parameters that are exposed, I feel like I hit the right balance between difficulty and fun. One major change that came out of this was to the rogues behaviour.  The game just wasn't fun or difficult when the rogues only stole one resource at a time as you replenish multiple every time you deliver resources. This needed to change, so the bastards now steal ALL the resources at the workbenches. This immediately made the game more challenging and fun at the same time.

After Lunch:

After lunch I tackled the last "required" major task; the tutorial. I am a huge fan of interactive tutorials as people actually learn to play the game instead of not reading the wall of text provided, so I built one. I forgot how long they take to build, they seem so simple but you have to make a lot of minor sub-classes etc to override default behaviour in exchange for tutorial behaviour. This puppy took me about 4 hours to build. I did get stuck on a nasty issue with being able to complete tutorial steps in a different order than expected which would lock the user out from finishing it, they'd have to restart via the in-game menu. The rogue in the tutorial also had a bit of a party.

That was it for the afternoon, the tutorial ate it all....but it feels good. 

The End:

In the evening I largely worked with Pedro swapping in final assets, changing to a custom font, skinning the UI and putting in a hilarious animation when the rogues get slapped. 

Afterwards the fun was over, I found a big bug with the sound effects and their volume. So in my engine (what is built on top of Unity) my audio management is kind of in a Frankenstein's monsters state. It is half way between the old world and the new and this bit me in the ass. In the new world I use Scriptable Objects for audio cue's, everything. This new world is lacking strong support for event types though, it is more made for a fire and forget sort of world. However, in this game, I used Unity's Audio Sources out of the box and tied them directly into existing game events so I didn't have to write a single line of code to implement sound effects. This was great! And then I found a problem. The volume SFX slider works...too well. In the main menu, the sound effects soften as they should when you move the slider down. However, in the game and tutorial, it appears to be an exponential drop off. As soon as it's not 100%, it drops to like 35% and quieter as you go. I spent hours trying to figure out a good fix for this, then a crappy hack fix and couldn't really come up with anything. If you plan to play the game, don't turn the SFX slider down haha. I debated hiding the slider completely but that wouldn't be fair to people that legit want to turn the sound effects off.

I finished the night waiting for the CI/CD to complete the build and writing this blog at the same time.

Wrap Up:

Today was a success again, I got a ton of things completed and the game is in a good state. Other than that audio bug, there isn't really anything other that I want to fix at this point. If you've followed along in anticipation, a build of the game is finally available here for Windows/Osx/Linux. Please try it out and let me know what you think.

 Tomorrow morning I'll doll up the itch page and submit, I'm too tired tonight.

Have a great night everyone. The next article will be a post mortem of the whole Jam but that won't be tomorrow. Thanks for reading.