This Week in the Forest! #44 (Patreon)

YO FOLKS~! Looks like another week's past! Let's start off with A Word from Vixel!

9/6 weekly report:

Last week I started by crunching to fix some critical bugs in our latest monthly builds. There was an issue in the Dustin Dash Challenge minigame causing the whole app to suddenly and randomly crash without an error message! :O This crash was very difficult to debug and involved analyzing the app's machine code (the instructions to the CPU to reserve RAM, jump between functions, etc) to figure out what was going wrong, since the error was so elusive it would freeze Unity and break the Visual Studio debugger (a tool that usually lets me examine running code). Once I figured out where the error would happen, I rewrote all the surrounding game code to clean up possible opportunities for the bug to exist. Seems fixed now, whew! :}

Next I jumped into our parallel Unity project and did a deep dive redesigning problem areas in the quest triggering system. (I'll be porting all our code to this project after we publish Act 2 to modernize the game in ways that speed up my workflow and reduce opportunities for bugs.) TFOL is a dialogue-heavy game, and throughout the dialogue, conversations unlock each other or trigger events -- like an unlock screen appearing, or a movie playing, or an item getting added to inventory. As our current design has evolved in the last two years, different kinds of conversations have started to manage triggering differently, which makes the code bug-prone and hard to maintain. This redesign unifies triggering to always work the same across all dialogue for all conversation types (quests, dates, gifts, movies, examinables, idles) with no special gotchas or nuances. Should make things WAY more reliable after Act 2!

Lastly, I brought a bunch of remixed music into the game! We've been working with a composer to help improve the mix on our various songs, and the results sound great! :}

More next week!

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On my side, I've been doing a lotta roughing out new content! I started planning out the last couple animations in Act 3, and started making progress on their motions as well!

Here's a sneak peak of part 3 for Melody's scenes!

And here's a sneak peak of the date that will show up this month!

I'm also whippin' up something for Dustin' and Rascal as a prize for mini game completions :> But i'll hold onto that one for now!

Stuff's coming along swimmingly~

But that's it for now! Y'all have a good week! See ya next time :>