Devlog 2
Some Bug Fixes
The little time I got to work on Rumble Crumble today was spent fixing some bugs that have been around for a while, namely:
- Glowing UI was showing through pause and amber screens
- Pausing wasn’t disabled during the wake-up cutscene
- Sometimes items spawn on top of Rumble at the start of the game, causing the points popup to crash and stay around forever
Issue 1
You can see an example of what this looks like here:
This was a bit of a weird one to fix, basically the reason this happened is that the material used to create the glow is HDR, with the emission value (brightness pretty much) cranked way up, past the normal range of colour. So I think the opacity of the pause menu overlay wasn’t “covering up” enough of the brightness from the HDR textures.
I’m sure there’s some fancy way to do with setting up the light rendering or post processing or something to allow these to be fully covered easily, but I couldn’t work it out so instead I made it so that whenever the game state is set to paused I disable those elements, which does the trick for both the amber break UI and the pause screen, as they both already set the game state to paused.
You may have also noticed that the little “x2” sprite is now not showing through as well, that was simply an ordering issue, and has been fixed as well.
Issue 2
Here’s a video of this bug:
As you can see, not absolutely game breaking, but not very professional either.
The fix was really simple though, literally just check if the player is in the WakingUp state when you press the pause button, and don’t allow pausing if that is the case.
Issue 3
I don’t have any footage of this one as it was quite rare to get to happen, but it would basically cause some race condition where the item/powerup wasn’t initialised before it was collected, and as such it threw an exception, causing the points popup to stick around until you restarted or finished the level.
The item still counted towards your score as well, so not really great behaviour for the player, but again quite a simple fix - I just implemented a sort of no spawn zone around Rumble, where if any item tries to spawn there it will try another coordinate.
That’s all I’ve got time for today really, not much but good to get these things out of the way as they’ve been around for a while now, see you in the next one!