Dev Diary 39: Release Date & More
Currently, the state of Lab 77 is as follows:
203 of 208 bugs have been squashed. All five remaining bugs require more testing.
Biggest news first: Lab 77 now has a release date, the 30th of May 2025! Having this set in stone now is rather daunting, but for now all I can do is proceed and make the final small adjustments and improvements.
Now for actual work; starting off from the last Dev Diary I continued working with QA and playtesting. During this I managed to find yet another level that had a hidden zero placement path, but I was able to resolve this with a change that I had intended to make before. I just hadn't dedicated the time (admittedly only 2 minutes) to make the change. I also found more death block collider issues again, but they too were quickly resolved. In doing this playtesting I also gathered the remaining data I needed to finish the placement data set. This task is something that I had been wanting to finish for a while, and one of the last pieces of the puzzle for the final release version to be built.
Moreover, I merged the Steam achievements with the Wwise implementation in order to begin working on the final release version of the game. This may seem a rather small task to do, however this project has been slightly plagued by version control issues and as the achievements branch was rather old by the time I merged it I was quite concerned it would be problematic. Uploading this latest version to Steam for testing did present some issues as I had forgotten that I need to update the installer settings as well as the build but thankfully I was reminded to do so, and the version seemed to work. I did notice one issue, that the level music was not assigned correctly when loading a save game. Arguably another bug that I should have caught sooner, probably when I first implemented it, but it is good that I did catch it now.
After this I made some more improvements to the UI. Something that had fallen through the cracks earlier was ensuring the tutorial could be completed with, and was properly set up for, controllers. I made sure that the instructions were set up for an Xbox controller, as that is all I have to test with, and that you could press the Start button to return to the main menu. Unfortunately, I do not have a way, least none that I have discerned yet, to identify a type of controller thus if I were to include PlayStation controllers the tutorial would have to be more general. I don't doubt that using other input systems would help in identifying controller types, however as I am using the standard Unity input system with some tweaks I had to do for rebinds I am not aware of this being possible. Though it is something I can look into if I have the time to do so. I also made a small change to notify the player that controller rebinding is not implemented. This is an item that is loosely on the to-do list before release, but as my rebind system is duct taped I can not say for certain that implementing controller rebinds would be possible.
That is all for this time, more to come in two weeks. Thank you for reading.
-Olav