That’s right! All sound effects, not a single one missing, are in the game. It feels good to finally let that one go. There’s more though.

I wanted to do a lot of stuff last week, and, even though I did, it wasn’t nearly what I had planned. I’ll have to catch up to this one because if not, I won’t have a stable final version of the game this month.

What have I done last week? Well, I’m glad you asked! We’ll dive right into it.

Well, the most important thing to keep in mind here is that my computer is slow-ish. So the next simple tasks take a rather long time to get done.

I added a level selector to the game. Finally. I mean, I still haven’t tested it yet, but it’s complete and it’s working, and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s what matters, isn’t it? Now the player can fly at insane speeds through a not-to-scale representation of our beloved Solar System and interact with all planets, no exceptions, and some of their moons.

Actually, you can even orbit them. It’s so fun!

To make that possible I had to use this awesome tool which is called Cinemachine. I’ve been craving it for ages and now I finally had the chance to use it for some goodness. Oh boy, how much fun was in that.

Then the painful process began… Going through every celestial body that can be interacted with on the Solar System and actually making them interactable. I mean, it wasn’t painful, but boring.

You see, my game behaves like a Jenga tower. You take one block off of it and it has the astonishingly high chance to fall apart. If you try to add something though, the thing becomes so unstable that… eh… it breaks.

That means dozens of bugs. All of the game developers out there know this pain. It’s frustrating.

Nevertheless, I got over it, even if without Bennett Foddy (pun intended).

Some really nice guy from the Game Dev League Discord server helped me with a shader effect that replaced the old Pixelation script that I used to create this nice retro pixelated visual style for the game. This improved the performance a lot, actually.

Talking about performance though…

I’ll work heavily on performance issues this week. The game suffers lag spikes out of nowhere and, weirdly, even freezes the UI permanently at times, even though everything responds normally, just without any visual indication of it.

So I’ll have to investigate that further.

But one thing I did that saved a ton of RAM was use Scriptable Objects instead of normal classes to store the needed data for the sound effects.

Think of over a thousand objects, all with a crap ton of variables and values stored. It’s painful, RAM-wise.

Now, think of over a thousand objects, each with two to six variables. It’s much better, isn’t it?

I also added a better starfield background to the game, and soon enough I will be updating those beta screenshots I uploaded here, on Game Jolt.

That’s basically everything I did last week.

Thanks for reading.