Hello again, and welcome to my monthly blog post. This time, I want to talk about a game feature that I have been refining in January: Harry’s smartphone.
The smartphone is the first tool Harry is likely to get in the game, and it is a very important one. The smartphone is one of Harry’s few links with the outside world. In the first few minutes of the game, he uses it to call his closest friend, Joe, for help. However, that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what Harry’s smartphone can do:
Calendar App
Harry can use the Calendar app to see important upcoming events, such as when trash and recycling are collected, when his home inspection and fines are due, and when he needs to go to work.
Contacts
Whenever someone gives Harry their contact information, it appears here for convenient dialing.
Pay Fines
Using the Hilldale Universal Municipal Payment System is the easiest way (and within the scope of the game, the only way) to pay any fines resulting from home inspections.
Internet
The Pebble search engine responds to specific, discoverable words and phrases and navigates to the appropriate page (remember AOL Keywords, LOL?) Download shopping apps, get help, and discover lore by keeping an eye out for keywords within the environment.
Shopping Apps
Once Harry gets some good, positive cashflow going, he’s going to want to replace many of his older, worn, and ragged furnishings. He’ll also want to keep up his stocks of household supplies like bug spray, fertilizer, and trash bags.
Invalid AABB, You Will Meet Your Doom!
As I try to gather screenshots for this post, a very annoying and rare bug has popped up. For some reason, sometimes when starting a game, I will suddenly get a spamflood of errors from Unity when entering specific zones: “Invalid AABB aabb” and “Invalid AABB a”. I first detected this right before GDEX, and it has been nagging me ever since, but only appearing rarely. So when it recurred just now, I dropped everything to dive deep and figure out what is going on. I finally have narrowed it down to junk items somehow getting NaN vectors for their positions. Hopefully that revelation drives a solution soon. Just 2 weeks ago, I resolved the most serious bug in the game, an eventing issue surrounding how Eastman’s parties interrupt sleep, which leaves this AABB shenanigans as the current most serious bug.