Week 3: Debugging, with a Side of Panicking Over Github

I spent most of the week working on Unity still. So much for being free of Unity.

Progress This Week: Coding

This week, I spent my time working on overall data storage rather than just the save and load system. I added a way to store whether or not certain encounters have been completed by the player, and also created a score counter based on what are chosen in these encounters. I also made the encounter and score data carry over between different scenes, since usually when Unity moves to a new scene all objects get destroyed by default. Last week, Isabelle created a game manager that prevents other managers from getting destroyed. So, I created a scriptable object for the player data and attached it to the game manager. That way, the data still remains between scene transitions.

And then, the major problem this week. Debugging.

There was a problem with our program, which was that whenever you would go through a scene transition, the spawn point would be saved even after hitting the play button on the Unity interface again. This meant that if you were to leave the first scene and return, the “New Game” button would end up spawning you in at that scene transition point. This also meant that if you closed the game while on the second scene, the player character would just outright disappear when restarting the game. This was because the player would be set to spawn in the second scene, but the first scene that plays when immediately entering the game is the first scene, so the player just would not spawn, softlocking the game.

Isabelle and I sat in a voice call for about two hours trying to fix this. Finally, we were able to get rid of the problem by adding a reset function that activated whenever the “New Game” button was clicked, which would reset the data in several of the scriptable objects attached to the game manager back to their default states. So now, you can’t get accidentally softlocked! Yay!

… We also merged branches on Github for the first time and it didn’t go as badly as we thought it would. More time was spent panicking about the possibility of messing up than the actual merging. It caused a minor issue, which caused the main character to duplicate, but it was quickly resolved.

Progress This Week: Research

I did not accomplish as much on research as I would have liked. So far, I have reviewed the full gameplay of OMORI in order to refresh my memory on what exactly I should be looking out for in reviews. Due to the nature of multiple endings, namely a good ending, a bad ending, and several variations of the neutral ending, reviews that can be used for my research should make some sort of comment on how these different endings affected gameplay.

I will be scoring each review I find useful by the following scale:

• 1: the presence of different endings / routes detracts from the experience OR the lack of different endings / routes improves the experience
• 2: the presence of different endings / routes does not affect anything OR the lack of different endings / routes does not affect anything
• 3: the presence of different endings / routes improves the experience OR the lack of different endings / routes detracts from the experience

Since OMORI has multiple endings, I will be using the first part of the scale as my criteria. However, so far I have looked through quite a few reviews on Metacritic and have not found many that actually make a comment about the endings, which is probably largely due to how these sort of reviews usually attempt to remain spoiler-free. The reviews I did find that discussed different endings was about the presence of the ‘hikikomori route’ early on in the game, which can completely alter your gameplay experience based on a simple choice of whether or not to open the door for Kel. So far, the reviews seem to believe that the presence of this alternate route improves the gameplay experience.

Up Next

I plan on focusing more on research in the coming week, and intend to complete my research on OMORI. I have yet to look at Steam reviews, and I hope I will be able to find at least a total of five reviews that discuss my research topic. I will also continue coding, and intend to finish creating a functional save / load system.