FBW Devlog - Onboard and Offscript

Unity is funny. Not haha silly clown funny. But more like, "Does that clown that's holding a red balloon and looking over here have blood dripping from its mouth?" kind of funny.

BUG #1!

In mid-September, I was fortunate enough to find a really good deal on Facebook Marketplace for a Quest Pro. Not in the cleanest condition and kind of smelly but for what I paid for a headset that includes face and eye tracking, I'm not complaining. I'm super grateful to the seller that hooked me up. Depending on where you live, Marketplace and some groups are about the only reason to use Facebook, in my opinion, especially if you're trying to find a cheap headset. While there are plenty of overpriced listings out there, in my area, if you hit the search once or twice a day within a month you'll find an amazing deal for whatever popular headset you're looking for. Anyway, of course the first thing I do upon getting a new headset is load Fresh Bulls Wanted; And I get into the dungeon and the thumbstick doesn't work.

I'm now freaking out, because if it doesn't work for Quest Pro, does it work for Quest 3?

(I still don't know, because I only have a Quest 2 and I just assumed everything beyond that would work. So please let me know in the comments or via private message if you're successfully using Fresh Bulls Wanted with Quest 3.)

I spent a considerable amount of September trying to figure out why code that fires off successfully multiple times suddenly stops working halfway into the experience and only on the Quest Pro. Finally, I give up, put it on hold, and start designing an exit scene (pictured above) to give people options to go back into the dungeon without exiting the app and to give a bit of closure to the experience.

BUG #2!

I'm not doing anything beyond what Unity is designed to do, but for some reason adding the third scene (1 being the intro, 2 being the dungeon) breaks my second scene and at this point the brainwashing code just doesn't load at all. It takes me a few days to figure it out, but in Unity the hierarchy (i.e. order you have your GameObjects in) changes the timing they fire up and for whatever reason, my scene loading code being where it was broke the brainwashing code but only when a third scene was added. Still not sure why, it just did. And rearranging my GameObject hierarchy brought it back up. I'm terrified to mess with it again, but I have no choice because I still have the onboarding code to finish.

BuzzyBodyVR Intermission

At this point, I needed a break from FBW so I figured I'd get mad at BuzzyBody for a bit, because converting it to VR would at least give me some issues that are reasonable to expect.

It goes almost perfectly. lol.

Honestly, I really can't complain. Besides the LoveSpouse support being kind of a pain in the butt (as usual) it went fine. I even added non-spherical 3D video support because I felt like things were going too easy and I wasn't ready to get back to FBW yet.

Unity Inc Adds and then fixes a bug

The first week of October I get a bunch of urgent emails from Unity and Meta saying that there was a Security Issue found in Unity and everybody needs to update their editors. This is not the end of the world, but it's definitely not my favorite thing to do. Updating editors in the middle of working on a project can be kind of a headache; It introduces new library names, installation settings sometimes don't get carried over, and sometimes it just outright breaks things.

It broke Fresh Bulls Wanted. Not horribly, but I had to reinstall a bunch of the XR plugins and Android dev related things and then somehow it fixed Bug #1. Quest Pro controllers now work. I don't know why. I didn't do anything I hadn't tried previously. They just work now. Fuck it, we ball.

But now my Unity inspector doesn't load variables to my classes properly on the first time. I have to click on my GameObject, Click away from the GameObject and rinse and repeat until all the serialized variables load up. Apparently, they added this bug back in March and then refused to fix it. Supposedly they finally issued a fix a few days after I got mine working again with a settings fix mentioned in the thread, but I'm not going to mess with it at the moment.

Alright where the hell am I now. Oh yeah.

ONBOARDING!

The Onboarding system is ultimately a dialogue system and so I don't want to half ass it and then have to completely rewrite the thing from scratch when I start introducing audio and other storytelling elements to the experience. But, since I'm also trying to incorporate gameplay mechanics in the form of button presses and holds, I don't necessarily want to shove all that in the same code that's handling the dialogue. It just becomes a mess. Hell, the initial version was a mess. That's why It didn't make it into my first testing releases. Funnily enough, things became a lot easier to organize when I started thinking of the tutorial aspects as minigames. And as you can see from the gif above, the onboarding system is coming along. I still need to refine the dialogue and some of the timing but it's almost ready for the next Proletarian Patron testing release. That should be ready in another week or two.

In theory, down the road when I start to flesh things out, this code will let me add audio dialogue, Question and Answers, head shakes, verbalization requests and a whole bunch more interactive aspects to the experience. So I'm reasonably happy with it so far. I think I've found a good balance of re-usability without falling for the call of scope creep that haunts me in my dreams. After all, I now have a headset that that does face tracking. A "Smile/Pout for me." mechanic could be an interesting addition to the dungeon experience. lol.

Conclusion

I think that's about it for now. Thanks so much for your support. As you can see, Game Design isn't necessarily as straight forward as just sitting down and adding a feature; Troubleshooting bugs can seriously mess up timetables and when you've only got an hour or two here and there to work on an issue you can spend half your time trying to retrace what you did last time. So I'm super appreciative of y'all giving me the financial buffer to be able to dedicate the kind of time I have on this. Hopefully you're enjoying what I'm building and looking forward to what's to come!

In Solidarity,
Comrade OohAah