11/9-12/3: Final Bug Push
I’ve had a lot of progress over the past two weeks. Here are my updates:
Steam Release (6 hours)
I spent much of my time this week helping out with the steam release. Although the steam release likely won’t be available until the middle of January, there is still a lot of work to do. The important elements of the steam release are:
Trailer Preparation: A good steam release needs a trailer, and to do that, they need cinematic shots of their units. To ensure that our marketing team could get those trailer shots, I created a cinematic camera in-game. Rather than marketers needing to clone the repository and mess with the Unity editor, they could enter a command such as “cinematic pan” to pan around a unit. This feature took a bit of time to implement, but it ensured our trailer makers could get good shots.
Release Coordination: I spent a couple hours this week in meetings and conversations with our marketing team (Antonio Perez and Athena Nguyen) to hash out the details regarding the steam release. These basically resolved the details of who would do which parts, the structure of the trailer, and the overall timeline of the effort (to get a steam page ready in time for the showcase, we would have to get it right first try).
Copy Writing: I spent time writing up the description of the game (which took a while to find the right words) and filling out various steam forms (they get very granular about the maturity ratings).
Graphical Assets Generation: Steam pages require graphical assets to be displayed. Halina Nguyen of the art team made cover art and sent me a Photoshop file of this cover art to use on the page. Unfortunately, this did not fit the required dimensions, so I had to go into photoshop and make different assets for each dimension. This required me to learn Photoshop.
Bug Fixes (8 hours)
I fixed a lot of bugs, including:
Fixed a bug in Tutorial 1 where units were not selectable.
Fixed null reference exceptions for the AI on maps that don’t have Key Locations
Prevented the player from being able to spawn a unit with no type
Fixed a bug that prevented camera pan at the lowest zoom level
Improved unit flow by ensuring that clicking off a unit cancels their movement
Fixed bugs where the wizard could not attack
Prevented the player from moving to a different tile than they’re supposed to in Tutorial 3
Fixed a bug where the “guest” could not see their champion in the multiplayer lobby
Fixed a bug where the other player’s walking animations would not play
Fixed a bug where players received more gold than they should have
Fixed a bug where commander special cancelling caused unintended behavior.
Fixed a bug where the Arch Mage and Old King special abilities would not work
Repository Management (4 hours)
I spent a lot of my time on maintaining the repository, which involves merging pull requests, fixing Merge Conflicts and hotfixing the build when needed. I merged in 80 pull requests in the past two weeks, which is nowhere close to the highest number. Unfortunately, many of those pull requests had substantial merge conflicts, and getting ensuring the scenes did not break took up a lot of my time. In the end, I was able to do it.