Reflex – Dev Diary 65

This week was focused purely on making sure all the nuts and bolts have been tightened and any remaining glitches had been squashed, ready for the big Early Access release on Steam this coming Wednesday!

The Reflex product page on this website has also been updated to reflect the impending release.

Last week a strange crash was discovered when the game was run under the YYC (native C) compilation. If the player spammed the right mouse button while deconstructing a component the game would silently crash. It turns out that the compiled version could get into a situation where a component was trying to destroy its self twice in one tick (1 millisecond). This bug has been fixed and I’m confident that there are no other situations that will cause a silent crash (no errors displayed).

Other tweaks and changes this week:

• Deconstructing a missile duplicator while it is still in the process of launching will now launch one missile immediately.
• The trophy display that pops up on the screen if the steam overlay is switched off has been haved in size to avoid using too much of the screen on low resolution displays (1280×720).
• The fade out/in on the world select screen has been corrected so that there is no longer a brief pause between worlds.
• The GUI buttons have been adjusted so that they are easier to read on lighter backgrounds (Ava in 5). The buttons now have a stronger black background; on rollover the buttons now switch to a transparent white background with black text and outline.
• Screen edge scrolling was broken on larger resolutions thanks to the change in how the resolutions were handled. This has been fixed to detect the edge of the actual display rather than the window bounds. This is important if the resolution doesn’t match the preferred 16:9 ratio.
• The AR logo ident has been reworked so that it is shorter.
• Music in the game has been set to stream as compressed.
• Speed up and down components now use pitch shifting to help illustrate the change of the missile speed. The pitch varies depending on the new speed of the missile passing over it.
• Dragging the screen with the left mouse button has been re-activated. It was previously disabled in case it was responsible for the silent crash.

And so there we have it. With this weeks update, I am officially drawing a line under the current version. I will be running the final compile to upload to Steamworks in the next day or so after my playtester has completed his run through World 3.

I myself played through the entire Early Access build twice this week to ensure that everything was ready to go.

So, if you are interested in playing my little game you will be able to purchase the Early Access build on Steam this Wednesday at 1pm GMT.