This post covers from September 13 to 15

The past couple days have been nothing short of a nightmare. Suddenly everything’s broken, nothing made sense. There were even Xbox gamepad exclusive bugs and glitches. Like for real. Stuff happens using only that piece of hardware and not with dualshock 4 or keyboard. Turns out it was Unity’s awful new input system.

At the end we ended up getting rid of it and went for a third party API that just worked out of the box and the problems went away. There’s still a lot to fix, mostly on the side of data saving and loading and some other issues while equipping weapons. Thankfully most of these problems are easily solvable but some others require extra thought before moving forward.

It’s extra fucked up that this is happening as I begin to hit my stride with content creation for the game, but this is also my fault. Truth be told, I’m definitely not a good game director. Not right now anyway. Each time there’s a significant obstacle I try to pivot the game design somewhere else and the code ends up bloated, full of things that we don’t need anymore or that we need but are no longer there after a previous change in direction.

It’s rather ironic that in an effort to do less work we end up in this sort of situations where we’re basically clinging to dear life.

That being said, THINGS ARE FINE NOW. The fire was put out and we just need to focus on stabilize the game again. Not the first time it happens, and honestly the controller stuff was our main concern since we had ZERO idea about the cause. And it happened everywhere! I’d plug my xbox one pad on my laptop, tested with a fully working standalone build there, and the movement was still busted. Same story on newprogrammer’s side. As for the remaining problems, many can be solved in a single day and then we can move to what we were doing before Unity decided to get funky.

At least it was fun to play the game while shooting the shit with newprogrammer. Gave us a better insight on the gravity of the situation and we have a much clearer idea about what to tackle first. A BIG weight has been lifted off of our shoulders and the future looks bright once again.

Fuck Unity, though.

Here’s the single best advice I can give to anyone tryna ship a mid-sized game with this thing: Never trust their features. They’re all half-baked, broken. Abandoned even. They call it “Verified”, but trust me, they might as well be deprecated with the awful, awful support they are given. I think probuilder’s vertex snap was broken for a full two years until they finally revamped the whole thing in Unity 2021. Timeline doesn’t work, new input system doesn’t work. We’re using the localization package and I’m 90% it’s gonna make us rewrite the dialogue system due to shenanigans we’ll encounter.

Make your own tools, use third party tools. Be skeptical of literally everything inside Unity except maybe the editor. It’s the one thing I’ve been able to use in a consistent manner for environment work, and even then it shits and farts every now and then.

Anyway, time to sleep!