Work Log

     On September 6, 2021 at 5:05pm MT, Mini Solar System version 1.0 was released. I had initially planned to launch at noon but a last minute bug with volume control of all things, delayed the release until the end of my day. This progress update will not focus on the work I did for the upcoming 1.1 release, but instead will be a post-mortem; recounting the entire development of the game. Overview      Mini Solar System started with the working title "Space Game" and development officially started on May 10, 2020 exactly 16 months ago to the day of me writing this. Development really began to speed up in mid February 2021 when I went full time on the project after deciding to defer university for a year; due mainly to complications related to COVID-19.      There was no real design goal at the start and was initially meant to be a way to display my technical skill and also learn more about the Unreal Engine while I was at it. At the...

    Preparing for Launch / Open Beta Post-Mortem      This is the last full sprint I'll have before the game officially launches in v1.0. I did a small amount of promotion for the open beta that got some people playing the game. I also made fixes and optimizations as well as a tutorial in preparation for the game's launch. Open Beta      I posted the game in 3 game-dev related subreddits and the project sharing channels of two Discord servers. The game page was viewed 72 times and downloaded 22 times for a download rate of 30.5% which I am happy with. According to the analytics page though, all of those people came from reddit so I will keep that in mind for future promotion.      I only got one bug report from the beta though. I assume because if you give the game to the public then most people won't be actively trying to break the game so I guess that's excusable. I did get a few questions though on how to play the game wh...

  The Organizational Update     This sprint was focused on making organizational changes to the game. Both on the front-end and the back-end. Front-End      The changes here consisted of improvements to the layout of the "Bodies" tab of the overview. The first two came as suggestions from the closed beta. Copy/Pasting Noise Layers      With all of the different parameters in a noise layer it can take some time to get exactly the result you want. To mitigate the amount of re-typing values by hand I implemented the ability to copy and paste these values. The overview of the system is essentially that when you hit copy the game will store a reference to that noise layer. When you paste then it will replace the noise layer struct with one created one to one from the copied noise layer. Duplicating Bodies      The other suggestion from the beta was to be able to duplicate entire bodies. This would help if the player is making lots ...

  Closed Beta Post-Mortem      Today marks the end of the official closed beta for Mini Solar System. As of the time of writing two bugs were found (one of which has been remedied) and five features have been requested (three of which have been implemented). Closed Beta Bugs      The first bug that was found was something that I thought I had already fixed a few times. When applying video settings the conformation box would pop up but the countdown text would not change. This seems to be an isolated issue however as it only happens on a single tester's machine. I tried to look into it but couldn't replicate the issue ever. I will keep it in mind going forward but for now it's on the back-burner.      The next bug that got found but was fixed was that setting the orbit visualizer to a high number of steps (we used 10,000,000 to replicate the bug) would cause the game to crash. I immediately realized that this stemmed from the fact...

  The Pre-Beta Crunch     This week's sprint was entirely consumed by bug fixes before the closed beta. I did a little testing over the weekend and gathered a list of changes that I felt were obvious and would be easily spotted by testers. It contained mostly aesthetic improvements but also some bug fixes and even a few crashes. I started off strong but the 80/20 rule quickly caught up to me. Day 1     Like I said, the sprint started with me taking care of the lowest hanging fruit. This was mainly UI tweaks; buttons not having correct styling, fonts not being applied, names not displaying correctly, and widgets blending in with the background, etc. I did also take care of some more major things like the planet collision formula, a crash that would happen because of an uninitialized a struct, and quitting to the main menu prompting the player to save before it does so. Day 2     Still going strong, I fixed some things that really should have been done ...

    UI Left, Right, and Center     This sprint was comprised almost entirely of UI adjustments and improvements. I fixed up the loading screen so it looks and functions smoothly and I tweaked lots of UI elements in-game with a new font and more consistent styling. Loading Screen     For the last few sprints I have mentioned a video by Epic Games as my blueprint for making a loading screen based off the action RPG demo . When I tried this approach though I couldn't manage to get the game to build with the extra module. So, a bit defeated by not being able to do something so simple I went looking around the internet for something else. Approach 1: Plugin     Pretty quickly I came across the Async Loading Screen plugin. From the outset it looked very promising. It seemed to have lots of customization, did exactly the same thing as the RPG demo, and seemed pretty simple to use. I will say that getting it up and running in my project took literally m...

  Menus & Collision      This week was a real roller coaster. After trying to put a dent into the backlog work from last week and trying to get all of this week's tasks done, I managed to get a lot of it done and am one step closer to the closed beta. Options Menu      The first menu that I wanted to implement was the settings or options menu. The goal for this was basically just to have a place to set display settings without having to use console commands. I was able to shortcut this process by copy/pasting the options menu from a previous Unreal Engine game that I had worked on with the working title "Top Down Game". This version of an options menu had all of the display settings I wanted as well as colorblind options which are always nice to have when it's a built in feature of the engine. I did find though that the framerate limiter option wasn't working for some reason. I was able to get around this by using the console command t.MaxFPS ...