#redid this scene and i think i learned a new camera trick that i like YAY!

[elderwisp]

◁ || ▷

Atlas: Would you like any? 

Taryn: It won’t be like last time, right?

Atlas: God no. It’s not bad. Swear. 

Taryn: Ok that’s pretty good.

Atlas: See? I don’t know why Kai likes Miller so much. 

Taryn: Because he’s an anomaly. 

Atlas: PFT- I can see that. Love him to death. 

Taryn: You don’t think he seems a bit pissed at you? 

Atlas: Honestly, yeah but I haven’t really been the best friend to him. So that’s on me. 

Taryn: Hmm. 

Atlas: I invited him out. Soonish. Look, things will settle. Eventually. 

Taryn: And your sister?

Atlas: I’ll get to that too. Someday. 

Taryn: Eventually is such a long time don’t you think?

Atlas: Hey, we were supposed to be talking about you. 

Taryn: My bad.

Atlas: So, how are you feeling?

Taryn: Mm… Good I think? I dunno, the shock hasn’t set in. 

Atlas: What are you gonna do now?

Taryn: Apply to other libraries. I even printed out my resume right before I left. 

Atlas: Bee… Can I still call you that? 

Taryn: Only if you tell me why.

Atlas: Oh god, no, it’s embarrassing.

Taryn: Then you can’t call me that.

Atlas: Dammit. I’ll tell you someday, when I work up the nerve.

Taryn: So you’re telling me you could woo the whole planet, but you can’t share this one thing?

Atlas: Bee- FUCK- Taryn, you don’t get it!

Taryn: Okay, whatever you say cassanova. 

Atlas: [ snorts ] Alright, tArYn I just think you should try something different. 

Taryn: Whaa? I enjoyed what I did.

Atlas: Why not publish your own book?

Taryn: Noooo no no. 

Atlas: Well now that you have plenty of time, why not? From what I’ve read so far, it’s pretty good. I’ll even help you proofread. 

Taryn: What if I get rejected?

Atlas: Even the greatest writers have faced plenty of criticism. Give yourself a chance. 

Taryn: Maybe. 

Atlas: Hmph. 

Taryn: I’ll think about it. 

Atlas: Would you much rather live in regret- Shit. 

Taryn: [ laughs ] Whoops!

Atlas: I'm sorry.

Taryn: It's alright.

Atlas: Did I get any on you? I can clean it-

Taryn: I’m okay. Thank you though. 

Atlas: Of course. Taryn? You should take the risk.

Taryn: You aren’t gonna let up, are you?

Atlas: Probably not.

Taryn: And I’m the stubborn one?

Atlas: You’re the one that keeps saying no. 

Taryn: Fine, I’ll drop some copies off, when I am ready. 

Atlas: Fine.

[impurelight]

Banality Wars Updates

I have a game I'm working on called Banality Wars Carridin. It's a turn based strategy game similar to Advance Wars. I have been posting updates to my patreon here. I have beeen meaning to cross post them for some time now but I finally decided to do it. And because I'm quite behind I decided to post the past 2 updates.

Update For May 29

So I didn't get much work done this month. I got sidetracked by this Code With Friends Event. But I did do a lot still. Most notably I completely changed how the AI decides to build things. It's not perfect but hopefully it won't build so many recons now.

Also I fixed this bug:

That is there are four buttons appearing on one tile when there should be only one button with 3 buttons around it.

It was quite a pain. It was actually an issue with the buttons not being repooled properly. Repooling is a process where instead of destroying the old button and making a new button we keep the old button in a suspended state and use it again later. This can improve performance because the process of creating and destroying a button can be a little costly. Repooling is a pretty simple solution, but you have to reinitialize things correctly, as I learned. I have no idea why it was even working before. These two variables were randomly flipped and... Well, it's fixed now.

Also fixed another bug where units weren't being loaded if they got interrupted on the way to the unit they were being loaded to. That was another nasty one.

I also tweaked 2x05 (Capital Offence) and 2x06 (Reclaiming Hope) with 2x06 being completely redesigned to make it more interesting. Oh, and units can start on Landers to get the lore of that map working.

I also added the trial map 'Like Shooting Fish In A Barrel'. It's not the best map in the world. It's mostly to check if the AI unit generation (that I completely redid) is working correctly but it's there.

Also the UnitActions camera tricks have been significantly improved.

As always to play all the maps open up the console (` or double tap where the second tap is a long press) and enter the command 'unlockall' to play all the maps.

Some other improvements.

Added the 'We Have Been Spotted' check for dialog.

Building a submerged sub now only makes noise if we built it

Rockets have slightly more defense

Improved toast animations

Fix one frame error in confirm dialog

Significantly improved UnitActions focusing on click

Fixed long pressing on maps

Fixed wrong order of actions playing at the end and end game things in general

Update For April 30 (I try to post an update every 2-3 weeks but got side tracked)

The above video shows off my new testing system. I was originally thinking of including it as a GIF but the GIF was 18 megabytes. So I decided to put it on YouTube instead.

Anyways testing is the big thing I added these 3 weeks. Testing is the big thing in software development but not so much in gaming. Like, how would you even start? Unity, and presumably most game engines don't offer some easy way to test things. So instead the only way to test a game is to hire a QA team.

So I guess I was always a little scared of tests. But recently I made a contribution to Google's Flutter project and part of my contribution was I had to write a test. I tried to weasel out of it. I said, "This small change doesn't need a test." But the person reviewing my pull request got me to cave and write a test.

And it really wasn't that hard. I mean, writing a test for Flutter was hard because the entire system is just terrible. But the whole concept of writing a test and checking if the system worked properly wasn't that bad.

So I eventually thought, "Could I write tests in my game?". So I tried Unity's native testing framework. And it sucks. Tons of errors about not finding assemblies and it closed all my scenes when I ran it. But not perturbed I wondered if I could use some other method of writing tests.

And I remembered back to an asset I used: the In-game Debug Console. It's actually MIT licensed and I submitted a pull request a while back. And my pull request got it working pretty well. Maybe I could use it to run tests. So that's what I did.

The entire system is at my: ModularUI repo. I combined it with ModularUI because the testing framework relies on it to insert mock inputs and rather than maintain two separate repos with some stuff disabled in both I decided to merge them.

So when you run it it runs all the tests like in the video and outputs a report of what tests passed:

So you may be wondering, "Does it work"? Because it actually takes quite a while to write the tests. In some cases it takes longer to write the test than it does to implement the feature.

And I'd say yes, it does help. I already found two major issues: the first was UnitActions wasn't disappearing after selecting an option from a multi menu and the second was that long touches weren't being removed.

So onto the actual features.

First off there is a new trial map: Budding In.

As you can see there are three islands. The two that are connected are occupied by the AI. That leaves the player to have to bud in (hence the name) to the current battle. I actually had the idea for the map a while back but I didn't have Landers working. Now that Landers are working I can make it and it's actually pretty good.

You know it's funny, when I was playtesting this map I got that voice in my head, "You're supposed to be doing work, not playing games." Well, sometimes they are one in the same.

Similarly 2x04 (Reason In Madness) has been improved. The original plan of allowing the player to go up to the third island directly is now done. Except due to the AI being terrible it may not be the optimal solution. Like what is happening here?

I definitely have to create some tools to diagnose what the AI is doing.

There's also a new toast animation

Other things:

Fixed That Problem With The Greyscale Shader

Updated To Unity 2019.3.10

Refactored buttons: https://andrewzuo.com/post/616675484059713536/notes-on-refactoring

So that's where I am with Banality Wars Carridin. If you want to play the latest build be sure to visit my patreon.