I've been away for a few weeks. First things first: When is the next update? 2-3 weeks I think. Where have you been? Taking a break from the highly ambitious Human Factory to work on a much simpler project. I have made a devlog for that and it is ongoing. I'll post more when we have something in case anyone here is interested. Why did you take a break? I am a single developer and Human Factory, while an incredible learning experience, was a bit of a foolish project for me to take on by myself. I decided to have a go at another project over a weekend and I had so much fun with it I decided to give a week, then a month to it. What next for Human Factory? This was a crazy ambitious project for a fairly green single developer with no budget, but hey we're already over half way done so let's finish it. Summary of this week: Now, coming back to Human Factory, I've made some great progress in the last week. The break was worth it, as sometimes it's easier to fix things when you walk away from it for a while. The frame rate has doubled, old nemesis bugs have been squashed like I'm Goku returning from the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. What's in the next update?: As I've stated before, optimization and polish. Not just in aesthetics but in gameplay. Much more robust AI, with a smoother difficulty curve. If anyone is eager to play the next update, I'll post it now. But I think I can get this ready for you within the next 2-3 weeks. Then finally we can start adding the new content like Cooking and Genetics before rounding up to release. So, it's been an interesting couple of months for me. See you soon with an update! Monday 27th: So now the game runs from start to finish. I almost got a full playtest today except for a weird bug where apparently my castle has too many vertices. Also found a few little bugs which I listed. I could keep adding mechanics, enemies, statuses, etc, but I need the assets department to catch up. Right now we just need Unit sprites, a bunch of sound effects and music and a better UI before we can think about putting a demo out. I also want to play a bit with lighting and do some tutorials to see if I can learn some nice tricks. If I'm going to put out a demo or anything for Another Rogue, I want to make damn sure people know I haven't finished with Human Factory yet. So, this week starting tomorrow I'm going all in on the Human Factory. Spent some time setting up for that. Tuesday 27th; Back to Human Factory today. Started by fixing some weird bugs which stopped feeding from working, and while I thought about overhauling the code I found it wasn't difficult to fix. A few other little bugs to find and fix and it's going fine. Added the Mood floating text and made it just text for now. Nice achievement. Tomorrow I'm focusing on some Animation as well as fixing some UI bugs and a couple other random notes. Thursday I'm going to hit that optimization I've had on the list for a while. Then Friday continue playing and fixing and hopefully we'll be ready to upload a new patch soon. Wednesday 28th: Starting today by sorting out some animations. I was going to do a thing where the animation would handle the movement within each Station or Processor, but in the end I think it's better to handle that in script. It means fewer animation files to be made. Also some fixes to the Button animations in the UI. We now have smoother animation overall. As intended with my little break, coming back to the project is nice. After some initial refamiliarizing with the project, I'm finding it really easy to fix all the little problems that were plaguing me before. With all known issues sorted, tomorrow I'm going to finally knock that bit of optimization I wanted to do off the list; splitting the 'UpdateAppearance' script on the Human so we only update what is needed each time. Thursday 29th: Very quickly got that optimization done. This should be a big improvement to frame rate because we're no longer reapplying materials or re-instantiating things when I don't need to. Instead of 'UpdateAppearance', we only update the part that has changed. So while the Size of the Human and the Shape of its torso should change very often, materials only need to be applied on load, start and if skinned. Hair and beard changes only when grown or changes. Everything only when necessary. I am likely to run into some bugs where things don't update, but it should be very easy to bug fix that. I think this should also deal with any issues of things not coming out properly. I have a couple other optimization notes here with tidying/improving Automation and object highlighting when Items are in hand or not. I think I'm going to shelve those notes in favour of testing this build and hopefully getting an update out sooner rather than later. Now to press play and fix. Seeing a few little bugs straight away. Made a list of things to work on tomorrow. The frame rate is vastly improved. I'm yet to see a proper stress test but so far so good. Very nice.
Started knocking a few things off that list. There was an issue with the skin colour of the torso changing each time its updated. Humans were calling their own name instead of the person who changed their mood. I have a few things left on the list. Tomorrow the goal will be to playtest and fix as much as possible. Then by Monday I'd like to have a new Human Factory update out which will nicely accompany the Another Rogue announcement. Friday 30th: More playtesting a fixing, with a fairly long list of things I want to do before releasing a build. Came accross a terrifying bug where Unity would crash completely. It seems to be after I build some Stations outside of the range of the Humans and takes about a minute to occur. No leads yet on how to fix it. [Fixed today] On the plus side, the presence of the garbage collector has been almost completely eliminated from the profiler.