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We Are OFK ultrawide and FPS solution
🕑 Added 2023-01-27 18:35:33 +0000 UTCThis little narrative-based game first piqued my interest when it was shown at The Game Awards, prompting me to put it on my Steam wishlist.
It was released in August and I got it on the next day, which was extremely uncommon of the patient gamer in me! Sadly, it was much like The Quarry and some others in that it was windowboxed at 21:9 and wider.
As you probably know from my Chained Echoes post, my knowledge of Unity was decent and sufficient for regularly producing fixes but not great, so I could not find any solution from a bit of digging into We Are OFK.
Then I talked about it to PhantomGamers and we spent a few more hours on it together, exchanging bits and pieces of the research, though there was still no solution in sight. We both saw that the game's behaviors were quite out of the ordinary.
Now after I totally leveled up in Unity on Chained Echoes, I had another look into the code and the game components of We Are OFK. This time though it didn't take me long to figure out a way to fix the camera view. Unfortunately, the game logic was still heavily tied to its ~21:9 aspect ratio, with characters cut off and scene backgrounds not having enough width, so I had to accept the notion of making this fix solely for 21:9 (though, as always, I coded everything to be completely dynamic - not that it can help with the game limitations).
As with Chained Echoes though, the biggest outstanding issue was the UI. Not only did it not respect the set scaling behaviors, but much of it also relied on the presence of the letterboxing. For example, the subtitles were white and the game world was in pastel colors, making the text hard to read without the black letterboxing behind it.
Overall, this fix was another tremendous job feeling like a remaster, as the code-writing and experimenting took most of the hours of the past week. Every time I got stuck - which happened frequently - I just could not let go of my thoughts and ideas for how to make the fixes work. I also found that the past findings from August were essentially of no use, so all of it had to be from scratch.
The full list of the individual ultrawide fixes I wrote and tested looks like this:
- Resolution fix
- Letterboxing removal
- UI scale correction (the hardest!)
- Intro video fix
- Main view fix
- Subtitles and tutorial text outlines added
- Speech bubbles position fix
- Main menu texting quit button position fix
- Texting panel positions fix (very complex as well)
- Mushoria mini-game position and background size fix
- Debugventure mini-game position fixes
- Credits screen fixes
As a bonus, I also increased the FPS limit of 30 to that of the user's refresh rate. This part is enabled by default and it's been field-tested by me, though you can toggle it off in the config.
Was it all worth it for a relatively short game? I'm not too sure but the passion was there, and once again I learned a thing or two about fixing Unity games, creating another template for future works. I do have a few more on my mind.
The fix for We Are OFK is downloadable here.
