Reflex – Dev Diary 62

Test and test again. This week continues the massive testing of every level of worlds 1, 2 and 3 to make sure everything is up to scratch for the Steam Early Access launch on December 1st.

I uploaded the first YYC (native) compile of Reflex to the Steamworks Pipe to ensure that installation on a second PC was going to work flawlessly. There is a strange warning message being displayed about Steam Cloud syncing but the game is correctly syncing save files. I’ve put in a support query to YoYoGames about it and hopefully they will able to help me isolate the issue.

The holder component comes into play on World 4 and as I start to test those levels I noticed a few things that weren’t working with the new component. Firstly I wasn’t happy with how it worked. It is a relatively simple looking disc that is constructed that has 2 pulsing light circles around it. When the missile is held the light circles gradually change from white, to orange, to red, and then the missile is let go (unless the player launches first). it just didn’t look all that good to me so I wanted to go back to the drawing board and have a lok at improving it.

I gave the disc platform for the holder a new outer ring that encompasses the light discs. The light discs are thinner and are now always white. Instead when the missile enters green notches appear around the edge of the holder as these tick away they turn to yellow, orange and then red. This new style gives a much simpler way of working out how much time is left before the holder gives out and releases the missile.

I have also set it so that if a missile is being held and the player attempts to deconstruct the holder the missile is immediately released. Previously the holder could only be deconstructed if there was no missile being held.

Laser turrets in world 4 once again were having a habit of seeing through walls very briefly. This was due to the way the detection arc works. When a wall is detected the detection arc lerps (animates) down to the newest closest distance; the trouble with this is that there is a window of a second or so when the arc is exceeding the distance of the closest wall. I’ve increased the speed of change and this should hopefully sort out the problem.

The craft that flies onto the map and launches the Reflex missile has been replaced. This again was done to stop the craft looking too terrestrial. The new one is more in keeping with the new training space station from World 1.

There were a number of bugs with the save game code that I had to squash. And also I needed to move the game save time slot and level title into the savegame files instead of saving them to the game settings file. This is more for Steam integration than anything else but it does make things a bit easier.