This week was filled with a lot of small mini-triumphs.  I've been polishing and polishing the demo until it's finally starting to shine!

Art

From the art side, Ref has continued to work on the main menu.  We dove deep into Normal Maps, Particle Systems, Animation, Post-Processing, and proper reference resolutions to make it as awesome as possible.  We are so close to the final product.  All that's left is to finish animating the Main character, and Voynich and all of the art will offically be complete for the demo. Exciting stuff!  Here's a little progress screenshot to show where it's at.

Like I said, we're almost there! Just a little ways to go and we can start showing it off!

Programming

From a programming standpoint this has been an interesting week.  I have spent some time debugging sure, but the majority of my time was actually spent setting up a Demo Playtest and integrating with a metrics analytics tool.

For the playtest, I decided I was going to pay for it to get a general idea of what to expect for Wishlists and popularity.  Basically, this will prepare me for the official reception to my game and to see how people like the product as a whole.  If they enjoy it, or if the complaints are something I can fundamentally improve like performance or controls whatever, I'll consider it a win! And continue to invest in the project.  If however, people are simply not that impressed with the gameplay and don't have any interest, I'll have to start thinking about reducing scope to move on to the next project.  That's life!

For testing, I decided to go with the service: gametester.gg.  I had a lot of trouble logging into the site (i actually had to reach out to support for them to repair my account for some reason) but once I was able to access it, it actually was super easy and structured.  I've fashioned some questions to simulate how a steam user would rate and review the same, so we'll see how that goes.  Finger crossed!

The other thing I did was implement a metrics analytics back end to the game.  To be honest I really thought this would take 10 minutes max, but MY GOD DO ANALYTICS SERVICES SUCK.  Unity's service, simply does not work.  It has no documentation and feels completely unsupported.  I could not for the life of me publish any events.  Next I tried a whole host of other 3rd party services, all of which claimed to be light weight, but seriously, not. a. single. one. worked.   And my use case was VERY SIMPLE.   in the end I defaulted back to playfab, which I used to set up a leaderboard system for my previous game Frisbros.  I was hoping to try something new because it really is overkill for what I'm trying to capture, but honestly, it's the best service out there.  And by that I mean literally the only one capable of actually working.  

Next week

Looking forward to next week, I'm hoping to fully wrap up the main menu.  I'm so excited for this you have no idea.  After that, I'm going to continue debugging and tuning the game for a couple of more weeks, while ref works on tilesets for the third level.  Even though this won't be in the demo release of the game, I want to have artwork for it so that when we make the trailer for the game, I can show off a variety of biomes.

Anyway that's all I have for now.  Till next time!