Reflex – Dev Diary 67

This is the first post-Steam dev diary. Development continues at a pace and is heading nicely towards the second Early Access release in January.

World 4 levels are all in place now and the long process of testing of those has begun.

During my feature tests of World 4 this week I discovered a couple of bugs that were causing some very odd crashes. The laser turret (spoiler alert) which can pan round between preset angles was causing a silent crash. I was using a third party tween library to control these and it must have been something in that code that was misbehaving. I’ve taken the code out and replaced I with my own. I’ve also added in a down-time for the turret so that once it has fired the turret will go dormant for a short time before continuing its patrol.

There was a second issue with the holder component where a caught missile would occasionally slip slightly outside of the holder component. It was a very odd glitch and it took a bit of work to find the cause. After I added in some debug text to each holder on a level I discovered that when a holder released a missile it sometimes failed to free up the link and so when the same missile interacted with another holder it would get additional positioning information that caused it to misplace. The code that controlled the holder component was missing a reset on the variable that tells it what missile it was holding on to.

The lightmaps across the game have also been renewed. I wanted to add a little bit of ambient lighting so that the outside of the base (the ground) is more visible.

The UI for the objectives, level win and level fails, has been slightly tweaked. I’ve moved the Reply, Continue, Launch and other buttons up from the bottom of the screen to just below the information panel. I think it works better here and makes them easier to interact with.

Some of the text for the world transitions wasn’t quite fitting on the screen for the lowest resolution (1280×720).

And finally. For World 5 I’ve started to add in a new environmental feature that will add a new obstacle. Planet quakes – these will randomly occur during the levels and will gently shake the screen for a certain amount of time. I’m looking forward to my playtester experiencing this. He already thinks I keep adding things to annoy him 🙂 In actual fact, I am just adding more obstacles as the game progress to increase difficulty.