TaleSpire Dev Log 318

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. So it doesn't reflect everything going on with the team

Greetings everyone!

I'm here doing TaleSpire things again after a pretty nasty cold bug afflicting both myself and Hannah last week. We're back with newfound vigor, squishing bugs, developing features, and making art.

The art side of things has had a bit of a delay, partially because of the cold and partly because I decided to make some tiles for the Aberration set, but I keep getting distracted by non-art-related matters.

Another bug fix Patch (thanks to Camera Refactor)
With the rather large CameraController refactor released last week, new bugs did get past testing. As a result, the most recent patch focuses heavily on those. There was one particularly elusive bug as it only occurred in a standard Game Build. So despite how much I tried to debug it in the editor or using a Development Build, it just wouldn't occur. The bug, in this case, was "Depth of field Settings not applying properly on Launch." Unity is an amazing tool, but Order of Execution can sometimes be a problem when relying on their internal automagical methods found in MonoBehavours. They might not execute in the same order in dev builds and regular builds. This is a lesson that seems to elude me frequently.

A small piece of code used for testing at some point (I know..) was being executed after the initial player setting value had been applied. Turning the Depth of Field back ON regardless of the setting. This sleeper agent had just been lying there dormant ever since the setting was first introduced. Just waiting for the opportune moment for maximal confusion to jump down the execution order.

I ground my teeth as I deleted that single line of code.

Back to the patch! To make it a little bit more interesting, we added a couple of things to the Turn-based mode. A way to clear the initiative tracker, as well as being able to remove a creature by right-clicking their portrait in initiative edit mode.

The Turn-based mode is due for a redesign at some point and looking at the code; it was clearly legacy. Parts of it used the old Event-Trigger Components rather than the much more recent Interfaces. It gave me a reason to do some cleanup, hopefully helping with stability. 

Things like a "Round Counter" and the ability to have creatures occur multiple times in a single round, or only every other "round," make me excited to have another stab at designing the feature in the future. 

Houdini, Effects, and Terrain.
We recently acquired a license for SideFX Houdini to help with doing more visual effects. For people not familiar with Houdini (the Software, not the Magician), it is a Node Based 3D application focusing on Effects and procedural content creation. It excels at creating methods for generating 3d models and other content that can easily be used by artists and programmers alike. 

One example of using Houdini in the wild is Insomniac's Spiderman (An interesting GDC talk on that subject)

We're not planning to generate Manhattan, though, but I hope it will help us prototype the terrain tools. Maybe allow us to see what works, design-wise, and which systems we'll need to build. It could be a way to prototype without writing a ton of throw-away code.

So far, I've mainly been playing around with creating meshes in use for more visual effects. More on that another time.

HeroForge Intergration
There is no solid ETA on HeroForge. Baggers is still taking a break. It is closing in, though, and once he is back, we'll be meeting up in person to crank out the final parts. Legal stuff has also started up, being the very last part of the puzzle.

The rest of this week.
The rest of this week, I'll be focusing on art. First, there are a couple of things left to help with over at Dimension 20, on "A StarStruck Odyssey," (things with brings us a little bit closer to Cyberpunk/Scifi Release). Tomorrow and out, it's full push on the Aberration set.

Speaking of Dimension20, they released the first Episode of StarStruck for Free on Youtube. 

The show is a ton of fun, and I recommend checking it out! 

Thank you for checking out this DevLog!