Particularly Wavy Update

hey all,

I have not gotten nearly as much work done as I wanted to this week. I've had more or less full-time work hours at my (kind of) paying job, which has greatly reduced the hours I can put into the game.

But what I have got done is this: I now have 41 puzzles complete and playable. The first 30 deal with reflection, while the next 20 (once completed) will deal with refraction. In that vein, I have removed a vicious set of bugs due to some recursive functions that I was using to deal with interior reflection inside a prism. These bugs at first caused Unity's garbage collector system to go haywire, with lots of errors spamming the console about "78 bytes allocated at " some random location, and after getting those to stop, I ran into a bug that caused Unity to simply crash. So, I was forced to greatly simplify the calculation of these internal reflections, since they could cause the light to bounce around inside the prism 5, 10, 20, or even 30 times before exiting, and Unity would have to deal with potentially 100's of game objects being created and destroyed each frame if the player was moving or rotating the prism.

I have also submitted the game to BitSummit 2018, which due to my excitement about going to GDC earlier this year I forgot to do for BitSummit 2017. I'll be updating everything I can about the game in terms of publicity before we enter 2018: the latest builds for 32-bit and 64-bit will be uploaded to BitSummit and to the game's page on itch.io, there will be a devblog on itch.io about the updates, and Twitter shall crash due to all the views and retweets about my amazing game, and as Wayne Campbell would say, "Cha, and monkeys might fly out of my butt!"




Well, in any case, I have actually updated my BitSummit submission, the itch.io version, posted the game to FaceBook and to Twitter, and YouTube. And I have spent more time than I care to admit tracking down database errors, problems loading and saving XML during runtime after compiling and building the game, making sure that Unity is properly saving the data about each object that I place and configure while I am designing the levels (which since I am using a number of custom inspector scripts, is actually quite difficult or at least annoying), and a host of other obstacles.

That is all the work I can put in on the game in 2017 and maintain my sanity.My wife and I will be out of Japan on a much deserved vacation until January 8th, 2018, so I will not be programming or designing anything. Although, like any other time, I will probably come up with a few ideas for prototypes, new games, and things while I am brushing my teeth, taking a shower, or staring into space or enjoying a view on our trip.

Peace and love to all my friends and family. If you had a great year in 2017, I hope 2018 knocks your socks off, and if 2017 put you through the wringer, I hope you put 2018 through it instead.