Sloan Dev Log 6

These past few weeks we’ve been focusing on polish and a bunch of smaller bug-fixes.

These include:

• a big pass over the Citizen Display to make it more readable
• improving the usability of the onscreen UI
• adding a flashing text warning when district body systems are close to imploding/exploding
• make it so that you can't 'reverse' your progress on prayers with requirements like 'add 10 Dioxin to Yarnl Exocrine system'
• improve the 'completion progress strings' on prayers (stuff like 'need 4 more Dioxin in Arglax Respiratory system')
• tweaking the tutorial so that the Crank and the travel mechanics are disabled until the point where you have to use them
• some fixes to the reticle
• cleaning up the text of notifications for deaths, births, maladies and migrations
• polishing the flow from the main menu into the intro cutscene and into the main game
• some fixes to the way the win condition is calculated

We have also been doing some tuning of certain parameters, like probabilities of births and anomalies, to make the systems feel believable and realistic, and to achieve the right difficulty level.

We have also been doing some play-testing to catch some final small bugs and usability issues.

We decided to cut out the save system because of how much time it was taking from us to do things. The game lasts one and a half hours, so we assumed players would either be playing through it in its entirety or stopping without the need to save for later.

We’ve been having issues with the mac build of the game. Consistently, Genome: Body crashes about eight to ten minutes into the game when being played on mac. The two of us have different macOS, so the bug wasn’t because of that. We tried changing the version of Unity we were working on and the bug still persisted. We looked at all the output and player logs we could find, and each time it crashed, a different function was being called. This is all just to say that Genome: Body is going to be windows-only.

Otherwise, we are pretty jazzed about Genome’s release! Thank you to everyone who has been following this process, has helped out with feedback, and who have been on the team.