The third development update video is now up!
Kill Screen Fest
his past weekend, I went to NYC for Kill Screen Fest, where I was a speaker.
Kill Screen Fest is a one day event. This is the 4th year that it has been happening. Previously it was known as Two5six.
The day consists of a series of panel conversations. Each one would feature one or two speaker, along with Jamin Warren, the founder of Kill Screen. For the panels with 2 speakers, one speaker would be from the games world, and one would be from outside. Together, they’d discuss a shared topic.
For example, there was the “Hellscape” panel, which featured game developer Kitty Horrorshow of ANATOMY, and theater director Felix Barrett of Sleep No More.
There was a panel about post-apocalyptic environments, which had Alex Graham, environment artist on “Everybody’s Gone To the Rapture”, and Diane Lederman, the production designer on the shows “The Leftovers” and “The Americans”.
Then, there was a panel about the genre of girl detective, featuring Zeffa Kinney, the writer of several Nancy Drew novels, and Joe Russ, the creator of Jenny LeClue.
I was on a panel called “Bending Architecture” with architect Jing Liu of SO-IL. It was a really interesting conversation and we discussed a lot of the similarities and differences with creating architecture for digital and physical spaces.
All pictures from above are courtesy of Steve Cate (@Jrnicus)
E3 Prep
Currently working on getting ready for E3.
Yesterday was a pretty rough day, full of a bunch of strange bugs. I had run through a build of the game on PS4, and gameplay-wise, everything was there. However, when I went to the pause menu, the UI didn’t work. It worked fine on the PC. This was very worrisome, because I knew this was going to be one of those really painful bugs to track down.
Eventually, we found that it had to do with SRDebugger, a plugin I had downloaded from the Unity Asset Store. We hadn’t integrated the SRDebugger in the game. It was just sitting in the project folder.
As it turns out, SRDebugger puts itself at the top of execution order, which was causing problems with inControl. SRDebugger is meant for mobile dev primarily so this isn’t really its fault.
However, this is important to be aware of if you’re making a game for console. Many of the plugins on the asset store have not been tested to work with each other or on console, so you’re going to run into issues like this if they’re running behind the scenes.
There was also another bug that prevented me making builds for PS4. This turned out to be some corrupted file, and deleting the Unity project library and rebuilding it fixed this. However, the project is so large now that rebuilding the library takes around 20 minutes or more.
Finally, there was an issue where the inspector was showing rotation as quaternion values.
This happens when you have the inspector set in debug mode, but this wasn’t the case.
After searching around, I found this post: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/547905/inspector-window-transform-component-showing-only.html
We had a editor script that had this at the top:
[CustomEditor(typeof(Transform))]
And this was what was causing it. Deleting the editor script fixed this issue.
That’s it for today’s update.
If you’re going to be at E3 next week, I hope to see you there! I will be showing Manifold Garden in the Sony section.