While I still don’t have a solid release date for Laser Industries 3 (good progress is being made!), I’ll put up another blog post just for the sake of letting you all know how things are going. So far, HTML5 has been very interesting to work with. If anything, it’s a lot better than Flash. For one, there’s now an option for the game to load in increments rather than all at the start. While this does add loading screens in between levels, you don’t have to wait for the entire thing to load when you start it up. The current file size of LI3 as of this post is 28 MB, but hopefully I can shave a lot of that off before release. A lot of that bulk comes from the older voice recordings still in the game which are pretty gigantic in size. At this point, to keep it reasonable, I am considering cutting down on the voice acting, but we’ll see. As said before, it will be the last thing I add into the game.
Also, there’s been an odd bug in the converter that’s been slowing me down a bit: where if the player character dies, all the active objects disappear. Weirdly enough, it seems extremely arbitrary and that there’s almost no reason at all why it should be doing this since I’ve found no other circumstance for this to happen. While I would have just blown this off by hiding this by immediately resetting level like I did with Laser Industries 2, this simply wouldn’t work for LI3. There’s some unique death animations that are meant to play (won’t spoil what they are!) and this bug is preventing that from happening. Looks like I may have to painstakingly redo the code.
I know a good chunk of my flash games have weird bugs like this, but trust me. Any playtester would know how hard it is to find them. (Krayfish Entertainment is one person!) Most of the time, they don’t even appear when testing out the .exe version so it’s a problem with the converter. I have to find clever workarounds to be able to fix them. But even in the wake of this, so far, HTML5 has been the most accurate conversion so far.