administrivia

Hey Folks! Sorry for the late news today. Had a school function to attend with the family.

Most of the work today was administrivia anyway. But I did manage to rework the mouse controls to try an experiment with streamlining the user experience.

Previously, you could open the context menu by right clicking and holding over an item. And right clicking a tile would walk to it. Now, right clicking opens a context menu. No need to hold. And if the tile under the cursor is walkable, a "Walk To" context option appears.

Hey Folks! Good news, today. A lot more gamedev progress made!

But the day didn't squeak by without a bunch more admin work. End of Q2 is here, which means time to do the books, pay state taxes, pay myself, pay federal taxes, then tell the fed that I paid them. Still don't understand that last bit, but whatever.

Hey Folks! Some new admin tasks hit my desk this morning, so only a little dev to show off. However, it's at least visual!

After letting a few users test out the game unguided, one of the more consistent points of feedback is that the ship layout legibility needs work. A number of users had to put too much effort into understanding what is what, visually. And in particular with the floor and walls, that's not good.

Hey Folks! Another mixed bag today, as I juggled both admin tasks and some development.

The main thrust of today's dev work was finishing my clean-up of tooltips. I didn't expect to have a lot of time to deep dive into the NaN pressure/temp bug during fast forwarding, so I tackled the smaller task of tooltip legibility.

Previously, the tooltip was littered with debug info, weird names, redundant info, etc. When I let a friend test drive the game, they said they completely ignored it as a debug tooltip.

Hey Folks! Hope everyone had a good weekend. Beautiful weather here, and visiting friends pretty much all weekend. So a nice change of pace! I welcome the summer.

Unfortunately, a lot more administrivia for me to do today, as I answered emails, did more project planning, and generally try to course correct for the long term. However, Michael saves the day with a last-minute check-in of his recent work on "social combat!"

Hey Folks! Short update today, as it was another project planning day.

I think I've got the project plan and budget mostly complete now, with correct accounting of pre- and post-Early Access milestones. And in reviewing the docs, I thought of a few more things I missed earlier.

Hey Folks! Just a short update today, as most of the day was spent on budgeting/planning.

Recently, while testing a build to show a friend, I noticed that some of my AI was skipping over important part of interaction chains. Basically, the AI was remembering that the punchline of the jokes had a big payoff, and wasn't bothering with the setup anymore.

Hey Folks! Michael and I are still due for a chat, and I'd like to see how that goes before I decide on my next gameplay change. We both have some ideas to kick around, and it makes sense to coordinate.

So in the meantime, I decided to look into portraits again to see if I could make them a bit more stable. I tried to tweak one of the expression anims a few weeks back, and noticed some issues. First, it was a real pain to nudge all the bones around in Unity, and hard to see what I was doing without saving and launching each nudge.

Hey Folks! Bit of a short update today, as a good chunk of it was spent on some business-y emails. But we do have a bit of progress to talk about!

First of all, Aaron. Always lying down on the job. Ripe for some discipline, he is.

Actually, that's the first screenshot I have of the new avatar mesh and animations in the game! He's currently standing in idle mode, but there's a bug that causes the avatar to be rotated 90 degrees. So he looks like he's stone cold fallen face-first into the floor.

Hey Folks! Finally finished my Indie MegaBooth entry today. Took most of the day wrapping-up the video, checking the build for bugs, fixing the bugs, checking it again, and then writing a massive ReadMe.txt in case anyone gets lost...I really worry about what someone is going to think if they pop this build open and get lost. There's just so much going on.