Another Week In The Developer Life Of Jeremie

A good Friday to all! This week, I wanted to give you another glimpse of what a typical work week looks like for me. That means going through my tasks, trials and tribulations, and more! I always enjoy talking about what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading about it! As usual, this post is for Patrons only, thank you for not sharing it around!

Day 1 - Meetings and performance tweaks

Today was my day at the office. I love working from home, but having in-person meetings with the rest of the team once a week can also be fun! It depends from week to week, but I usually have between two and four different meetings; one-on-ones, Quality Assurance priorities, sprint planning and task review meetings. 

These are busy days, but I still had time to make some performance improvements (trying to make the game run as smoothly as possible on as many computers as possible) to our molding system, which caused a fair bit of lag whenever you would place many moldings on your walls.

Here we place some moldings.

It can be a complicated process, but it’s a very satisfying job. As you can see, the number of generated garbage (unwanted data that gets created and then needs to be cleaned up) goes from 150MB/219ms to 0B/5.81ms. It’s pretty technical, but smaller numbers are better!

In four steps, I optimized the generation code for the Build Mode’s moldings.

Day 2 - Bug Fixes, bug fixes, bug fixes!

Two weeks ago, Charlotte gave an overview of how our Quality Assurance process works. As you can imagine, as a programmer, it is my responsibility to fix the bugs (well, not all of them, but most of the bugs related to the features I’ve made or worked on!). Some take a lot of time, while others are quite easy to fix. Today I fixed a bunch of them related to the town map, photo mode and the interface shown when you select an item. The bugs were mostly due to the addition of new features not being properly handled at some places in the game. 

There was a specific bug where showing variations of an item didn’t show thumbnails properly. This took me a bit more thinking and I had to add some extra code to fix it up.

 In this screen, you select whether you want rails on the left or right side of your stairs. You can also choose to have none or have rails on both sides. The parts circled in red shouldn’t be present on the thumbnails.

Day 3 - Swatches, stairs, systems.

Today I had a remote meeting with Alex and Alejandro about our current reworking of the color swatch system for the game. It has been on our “to-do” list for a while now so I’m glad we are finally taking the time to do it! Alejandro is doing pretty much all of the work on this module, but since I’ve worked on the swatch system at the beginning of the project, I’m helping out a little on the design end of things.

One of the things we’re doing is making sure that players can create new color swatches easily or duplicate swatches made by the developers to edit them as they wish.

I also fixed some bugs related to stairs – some edge cases we didn’t account for where you place a stair somewhere with no roof above and various tweaks here and there on some build mode systems. An exhaustive list would be too much, but I poked at bulldozing walls, getting the wrong amount of money when you attempt to connect two walls that shouldn’t connect, and one very mysterious issue we have with wall/floor thumbnails that still baffles me to this day!

 It’s not a real remote meeting if I don’t have two cats hanging out around me. I hope my coworkers don’t hear Tofu (left) meowing too often!

Day 4 - Move wall improvements

One of the big task I have on my plate before we’re confident that the build mode is good for Early Access is improvements to the wall movement tools. You might’ve seen them in a video, a while back, but we felt they weren’t good enough for primetime. We don’t want all the walls of your house shifting in weird diagonals when you move a single wall, the game should smartly move your walls as needed to prevent that. I’m not (at the time of this writing, maybe future Jérémie finished the job, in which case, good job!) completely done yet, because there are many scenarios to keep in mind.

 Here’s one scenario of wall movement, there are many such cases.

Day 5 - More walls tweaks, more bugs to fix, more designs to ponder!

There are always more bugs to fix, so I start the final day of this week with some more squashing. Some issues with camera movement when you’re looking into terrain that has been lowered, some parts of our interface that shouldn’t show up but pop to say hello regardless, infinite money glitches using fences, the usual! When that’s done, I keep plinking away at the move wall improvements, properly handling other scenarios of what the player could want to do with their architecture. In the end, Alex and I discussed some design questions we still had after our latest round of playtesting.

These playtesters had more than one hour this time, but wow, talk about amazing creations!

Sometimes I wish days had more hours (or weeks had more days) because there’s so much to do, and so little time! I hope everyone had a good time reading about what I did for one week, and a good weekend to all!

Jérémie