Hello there, and a Happy New Year to all of you! I wish you health, joy, happy moments with family and friends, and fulfillment in your projects.

On my side, the last month has been quite productive with lots of little enhancements. It’s quite pleasing to see all these small upgrades slowly propagate through the entire game.

Level Upgrade

First, I worked on the visual upgrade of an old level that was far behind the others. I can’t show too much without spoiling, but you can check this out:

Still some work to do, but it’s already much more understandable than the previous “blocking state” look. I added crates, fabrics, desks, armchairs, sofas, pinboards, billboards, plants, arches, and architectural elements.

Doors & Enemies

I also took some time to start working on two things that were on my to-do list for a long time: signaling locked doors to players and adding contextual idle animations to enemies to tell a story without explicit dialogs.

Here you can see a mining robot. Yeah, I guess it’s better with animation and sound.

I used some kind of “hologram” to display the locked state of the door. I also use the hologram look on various other screens/displays/technological stuff throughout the world, so I thought that was the most logical thing to do. Plus, it’s pretty immediate to understand.

Unexpected Complexity

At some point, I added a super small improvement: displaying the maximum number of items that the player can collect. Surprisingly, this led to tricky questions about what I should do with unpickable items: destroy them? But when? What if the player can eat a few apples to regenerate her life and THEN free up some space to grab the apple on the ground? If the apple is destroyed the first time she tries to pick it, this feels unfair. Then should items be left on the ground? For how long? Should it be saved? What happens if the player moves to another island and gets back? And what will be the feedback for players to understand that they can’t take the item? It’s much more complex than one can expect, actually…

Many Bug Fixes & Improvements

In the end, I worked on ~ 250 fixes and updates, among which:

• fix old collision bugs
• fix bugs regarding missions, stories and dialogs
• fix animation of robots & pirates
• fix dialog translation
• fix confusing stuff
• fix graphical stuff (textures, reflection probes, particles, outline, cutscenes, shaders, bubble font size for 4K) on chapter 2
• clean database (old prefabs)
• fix old bugs arising from mode conflicts (what happens when cutscene+dialog+power up at the same time for exemple ?)
• add NPC Reno in zoological center + power up animal detector
• add accesibility option for camera moves
• improve full item capacity handling & feedback
• add fx & sfx for steps on terrain, rain, snow & breath in cold
• clean/organization on disk for il2cpp compilation (optimized build & console compatible)
• improve saves: bugs fix, clean & compatible steam save
• upload test build to steam

And that’s it ! As usual, thanks a lot for your support. I truly hope to be able to show the final game this year.

Peace !