More debugging to do in this last level, every day there are new discoveries, new bugs. The dialog is not done yet because this last part reveals a lot of the story.

I have spent some time doing a CV and a motivation letter, the 1st March I will start the job hunting! I am also trying to change my sleep schedule, to wake up in the morning instead of the afternoon.

I think the game still have few months of development, so I think by that time steam greenlight will be replaced by steam direct. But once the development is finished I will focus my time on the marketing of the game and maybe bugs.

I have been working on the computer terminal, there is some animations, loading bars that need a lot of tweaking to have a good delay. After that, I have fixed a bunch of bugs and I am doing the last things for the level to be completed.

The game will not be finished the 1st march, I have a lot more polishing to do, add soundtracks, beta test the game.

I have added a lot of new content so the polishing phase is really starting now. With all this content the game will still be short because there are five levels, some levels are bigger than other so I expect the player to complete the levels with this pace:

Level 1	45 min
Level 2	15 min
Level 3	1 h
Level 4	1 h 15min
Level 5	15 min

There are a lot of small puzzle interaction, but I tried my best to make them logic and pretty much obvious once you know what you have to do. I think the difficult part at the beginning is making the first discoveries to understand what to do. There is no tutorial in the game (even for the controls) so you need to make some discoveries by yourself, try things. The game becomes easier after you have discovered some of the mechanism but I tried to add new things along the way to break the pace.

This week I have made more content for the last level, a few more things and all the content be in the game. After that, there are some sprites to redo maybe make more animations and a lot of bug fixing.

I still have two weeks full time before job hunting, I know that at the end of the two weeks the game will not be polished enough. Most of the marketing (trailer, screenshots) will be done after the art is complete.

I don’t have the musics for the game yet, so I still have quite a bit of work before having an unpolished complete game. But that’s fine, the game needs to be polished to be ready, and it will be release only if it’s ready. The single most important things for games is quality. Quality takes a lot of trial and error and to do that you need a lot of time. The time can be reduced with experience, but since it is my first “big game” I have to go through almost all the errors. Hard work will eventually show someday…

A lot of bug fixing this week and optimization, I have replaced the unordered_maps with less than 35 elements with vectors of pairs.

Q: Where did you find the number of 35?
A: Should you be using something instead of what you should use instead?

This change introduced some new bugs with the lifetime of some objects, and invalid iterators, but overall the speed and the memory footprint is improved.

The level progress well, but there is still a lot of work before it’s complete but mostly the game is at the end of its development. Let’s compare the number of lines of code of the current project vs the old one.

Some of the libraries in C are included in the project such as NFont, SDL_FontCache, theoraplay, and the code generated with glLoadGen. The c++ code has 17269 lines instead of 7360 lines at the time I was working on the big level 4, and I have added a lot of content since then. The functionalities are in C++ and the content is in XML, as you can see now 5476 lines instead of 460 lines. The project becoming more and more complex and “heavy” the debugging is becoming more difficult, but hopefully, I have also improved my skills since the beginning of the game.