Warband Revolution

 

To the victor, the spoils - all 3125 of it

 

Work on Warbands and their strategies has progressed well during August, a month were the weather couldn't decide whether it wanted to be the height of summer or mid-November, leading me to keep both the Big Summer Fan and Autumn duvet at hand.

Warbands now traverse the game world - which is still a completely flat and open test area - in search of "Points of Interest" - which are currently tall blue cones to make them visible. Holding an area allows healing of wounded troops, and looting for good old fashioned cash/points.

Warband can now decide that maybe their battered team of a few survivors don't really fancy taking on the huge opposing warband which they have just encountered, and may evade battle by fleeing. Eventually, once I have bows and crossbows working, warbands will have more options for battle than just fight or flee.

Combat now ends with one group deciding that it's time to leave pronto, with unit cohesion breaking down and a total rout breaking out. Pursuers will attempt to block off routed enemies and hack them to bits - it's good for individual XP which can be used to upgrade stats whilst healing at a "Point of Interest", and also for looting loot from the defeated corpses. A routed warband automatically drops half of it's loot in panic.

 

So there is the battle, which the top pick is the final result of. I didn't video all the battle because much of it was just surviving warbands moving from lootable position to new lootable position, so here is just the action.

I also upgraded the weapons, filling out most of the planned classes. This meant modeling some new meshes, and requiring new animations for attack and movement, because a spear obviously does not work like a broadsword. The new attack animations are based off the old ones so look a bit rough at the moment, and will do until I get chance to rotoscope myself cocking around with pole weapons.

 All fine for one handed weapons, but a Viking Long Axe kinda needs it's own moveset where BOTH hands stay on the pole, and so I cried; "once more unto the breach!" and had another look at Inverse Kinetic tutorials.

How IK tutorials are supposed to look - it doesn't work of course

 Now there has been a long running issue with IKs for ... oh about 18 years. Mainly that I never got them to work way back then and ignored them ever since. To be fair, the number of tutorials and easy of use idiot proofing of them has grown exponentially since I first picked up Blender3D in 2007. The idea is, you give the pole an armature with a hand bones high and low, and a central root bone. When you want to move the arms you move the pole's root bone.

And how it looks in game - busted

 

Naturally this doesn't work, because life would be easy if it did. In the above image, Left Side: the lower hand is offset from it's target in the game engine, and in Blender; Right Side: a second pole (selected orange) shows what the actual mountPoint angle is, just as it looks in game. Even though the mountPoint is parenting to the weapon pole armature. No matter what I did, the rotation was always wrong.

So I came up with a solution. 

MountPoint parented but not connected to hand bone

 Now I have previously noticed that Blender and Torque3D open source game engine, like to think that the origin of a bone is at opposite ends, which caused a bit of trouble when parenting hitBoxes to the character previously. So I extended the tips of the hand bones to be level with the mountPoints. 

Hand bone tip level with mountPoint

 The mountPoints themselves will go all over the place if IK'ed - because they are not connected directly to the other bones - so I used the hand bones for the IKs. The weapon had 2 bones now, the top hand point bone was now IK'd to the character's own right hand bone, and then the character's left hand bone was IK'd to the weapon low hand point bone. Dem bones, dem bones, dem ... dry bones!

Weapon IK'd to the right hand, left hand IK'd to the weapon low bone

Now both hands remain in place on the pole because the pole itself is IK parented to the character, and the character is IK parented to the pole. They are no longer ... poles apart! Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all night!

I have since cleaned up the twisting in the left bicep

 So, with IKs finally understood, and working in game I set about animating for two handed pole weapons ... and immediately hit another snag. The weapons themselves needed animating for different states of their ShapeBaseImageData FSMs, otherwise they would be held in the wrong places at the wrong times, holding a pole close when moving had to different from slinging it out to maximum reach in battle. 

After that I had to synchronize the speed of the animations to keep pace with the changes in animation speed of the character's actions, because everything speeds up or slows down depending on making a light or heavy attack for prepAnim or attackAnim. Because attacks use the same button with release time being the deciding factor between light and heavy attacks, light attack for the weapon FSM was being called faster than the prepAnim was ending, so I took the transition to fire out of the FSM and moved it into Player Class animation code for when the prepAnim ends. If it's interrupted there is already a fallback in the FSM for that.

Long Axe is Long!

 I also changed how shields worked. Previously I had them as StaticShape objects, but now I moved them into the ShapeBaseImageData with weapons for easier mounting/unmounting. They share the same parry values as weapons but are seperated by a simple isShield flag. As weapon "images" are not real objects they should also be easier on network load than mounted StaticShape objects, especially with lots and lots of heavily armed warriors running about.

 

  August is over, summer ends - though to be honest my little patch of God's Own County didn't get much of that, when everyone else was going hysterical about "heatwaves" I was shivering under sea fog.

Next month, the cunning development plan is to start actually modeling the armour of the characters, and develop a system were different warbands equip unique looking items. A lamellar helmet and early spengenhelm may be the same class in game but there is a big difference between what an Avar or Lombard helmet looks like and a Saxon Sutton Hoo helm.

Autumn is here! 

 

Shields, Spears, Seaxes and Warbands

Saxon Warband - you can tell they're Saxon because of that one guy with a Seaxe and the bad teeth

So after getting parrying work last month, it was time to work on shield guarding. Shield Guarding is the easier version of parrying, were you hold up a shield and let the other guy hit you, and the shield absorbs the damage but the defender loses Stamina. If the attack does more damage than the shield's defence rating, then the defender will lose even more Stamina, and if their Stamina reaches zero, their guard is broken and they are staggered - cue free hits. Shield Guarding also slows the player's movement speed.

 With shield guard added to dodge and parrying, the basics of combat are pretty much finished. I did some tinkering with the Ai and they now hunt their opponents on actual sight rather than the previous positioning system I had in place. This makes combat a lot more fluid, and here's a video to prove it, including a brief "look the Ai can now Shield Guard" at the beginning.

 I also noted that the Player themselves could only lock on and off of a target. The camera would then revert to whatever direction it had  before the lockOn occured, and this could be rather disorientating if the Player had done a lot of moving around. Now the Player can cycle through targets left and right by line of sight, and when they end lockOn, the camera stays where it is and just gives input control back to the Player.

 Next up is the crux of my game concept ... warbands!

Warbands are basically teams - and I've got 16 of them with full equipment lists -  that will trudge around the game world, looking for loot and combat. Whilst the main theme is warbands wandering around fighting each other and the Player scavenging equipment/coin/XP from the dead and dying, I am planning on letting the Player eventually being able to join or ally with one, probably for a Danegeld or something. So they'll be a friend/foe system based on previous encounters and the warbands won't always be in a rush to spill each others - or the Player's - blood until something kicks off and vendettas occur.

Norse warband - you can tell their Norse because of their armour stats which I don't currently have models for ...

 I am testing the warband system with just two teams at the moment, Saxon and Norse. This has meant a sudden influx of modelling, as for testing equipment I have needed, axe, longAxe, spears, seaxe and a variety of shields, Targe, Rond and Kite. And then there is the armour, cloth, leather, lamellar, chain, brigandine and plate. The armour is equipped fine and the defensive stats get set, it's just that I don't yet have any armour models so to show that the armour has been successfully equipped everyone has taken to wearing a box on their head.

I also only really have one handed sword animations at the moment, which tends to look a little odd when someone is holding a two handed Long Axe, and combat with a spear involves more thwacking than poking at the moment.

 Each warband has a list of ranks which, apart from equipment, basically detail the attributes and available XP for upgrading that character. Ranks are based on warband type, so the Saxon Fyrd is heavy on low quality levies for the shieldwall with a single Thegn (elite/Knight) and a couple of Huscrals (Men-At-Arms/Heavy Infantry) and no standard Soldiers, whilst the Norse are a more professional outfit of raiders, which make them much more expensive. Both side have few archers and I the datablocks and animations for projectile weapons are still very much on the todo list. For the moment I am concentrating purely on melee, and getting the warbands to move from one location to another as a vaguely cohesive force.

Rather like good old Warhammer, each warband will get the same amount of army build points, set to whoever is the most expensive for a basic force of 10 troops. All other warbands will then get the opportunity to deploy more men, so the largely peasant Saxon army will field 19 troops for every 10 Norse. Whilst the Fyrd's levies may have poor armour, and no bonuses to physical attributes, that is still a lot more spears to be sticking out of a shieldwall. 

Eventually I will get round to battle tactics, such as shieldwalls, but for the moment it's just charge at the enemy and start swinging like a madman.

Next up is getting the warbands to move around to certain points of interest which are just markers placed in the editor. Once I have an actual terrain map these points of interest will be a lot more interesting.

Once the warbands are fully up and running I will start on modelling armour so they finally begin to look the part. 

July is over and it's already August in Space Year 2025. Stop the world I want to get off! 

Monsters Loot Swag - New Game Plus

Steam Summer Sale 2025

 Steam Summer Sale is upon us, and just in time for Monsters Loot Swag NG+ update!

This major update give a whole host of modifiers for repeat playthroughs (New Game +) , which can be selected individually or as multiples. Here's a quick rundown ... 

After completing the game by gaining Final Victory in the Final Level over the boss's Final Form, NG+ is unlocked, allowing for the following modifiers.

•   House Of Fun: All enemies drop explosive funballs on death, and enemies which dropped them in standard game mode now drop more. +20% Score Bonus.
•   Test Of Strength: Both Players and Monsters do triple damage critical hits with every attack. +20% Score Bonus.
•   O Fortuna: No SWAG parcels spawn, instead there is a RNG for monsters dropping SWAG on death. Chance: 5% monsters, 10% elites, 50% Bosses, and a 1% chance of dropping a Nerve Gas Bomb. +20% Score Bonus.
•   The Harder They Come: All enemies spawn as elites, even Bosses. +20% Score Bonus.
•   Targeted For Termination: Every 9 minutes of gameplay a specialist team of Anti-Catgirl Assassins will spawn, 6 members with 6 unique special attacks. +20% Score Bonus.
•   Endless Mode: The game continues after level 8, cycling back through the levels with ever increasing difficulty.  

With the exception of Endless Mode, which is it's own bonus scoring system due to the game never ending except via the Player's defeat, each selected gameplay challenge adds +20% to the Player's scoring. 

Saved Games Display Their NG+ Modes

And here is the whole thing in action on video:

 In other news ...

Flaming June was flaming hot

 Last year the weather was so bad I grew a single, tiny strawberry ... this year I have buckets of strawberries, more kale than I can fit in the freezer and one hell of a tan!

It has been proper scorchio, but the pursuit of free vitamin D hasn't prevented me from getting back into coding on my Melee Combat Demo.

I have spent the month, (inbetween updating Monsters Loot Swag, harvesting my bountiful veg patch, and absorbing vitamin D in non-capsule form), to working out the finer points of defense in the Melee Combat Demo. 

I have a combined a Dodge system into the Jump input, with a tap of the Jump button being a Dodge whilst holding the button down to apply a Jump. The dodge defaults to away from the camera view, as I expect the Player will be looking at an opponent most of the time, but the dodge can be made in a selected direction by the Player putting movement direction input in before the button tap is completed.

 Getting this working and networked for the player was not too much trouble, and I eventually got it working the AI aswell, as can be seen in the below video were I telegraph a heavy attack to the AI target. 

A bit more coding and a lot more maths, and the AI now checks which is the best way to dodge from an incoming attack in the obvious choice is blocked.

 During coding all of this I discovered that the hitBox collision resource I was using had the minor drawback that there was no boolean option for actually disabling checking for hitBoxes on hitBox enabled objects when I just wanted to test ONLY against their Bounding Box presence in the game world. 

As CastRay is used EVERYWHERE in the engine it seemed like a fool's errand to modify every single instance of that, so instead, after much methodical backtracing of how the function worked, I created another version that would always ignore hitBoxes, and so CastRayNoHB was born.

After all of this I have set about coding a  Parry system, which has been even more complicated. The real problems come from the fact that a Player, unlike the AI, might not actually be locked-on to the enemy they are about to hack at, and what happens if there are two Players, with neither locked on to each other, or someone is standing near the target and is also going to get hit in a wide, swinging, heavy attack - well maybe they would like to parry too.

So, I managed to code a system, based on AI skill modifiers, that checks proximity, parry ability, direction, weapon parrying attributes and a whole load of other stuff which I have forgotten off the top of my head. It doesn't actually use i-frames, but checks against a; "where is the incoming strike in relation to how far we are into the parry animation", and even a successful parry may be overwhelmed by a larger weapon, but does then limit damage. Too many times I have seen games were a Bollock Dagger blocks a Zweihänder with no ill effect. A fully successful parry staggers the opponent (technically it's knockback for the duration of the attack animation rather than full stagger) which allows for a light attack reposte that will hit for critical damage. No video of this happening yet, as I am still debugging the code and working out animations.

After Parry, the final defensive measure will be Shield Guard. Shields will not be used for parrying per-se, but will absorb damage dependant on Shield type which will deplete the defender's Stamina, whilst reducing any damage that does get through the same as parrying works. If the defender runs out of a Stamina their guard is broken and they will be staggered.

I suppose I could also throw in Roll-Slop, and give the Player the opportunity to decide if they want to use that instead of the dodge mechanic, but that would be decision for a later date.

Anyhow, happy strawberry munching everyone. 

Monsters Loot Swag Releases

 Monsters Loot Swag has been officially released on Steam!

 After a good two years in Early Access, I finally finished it off and pushed it out for full release. So how did Early Access go? I expect I got what most "Literally Who No-Name Indie Devs" get, very few people noticing that you exist.

It took 11 years but it finally got "Mostly Positive" reviews - if only just

 To put this into context, when I launched Airship Dragoon way back in the heady summer of the year of our Lord 2014, my initial Steam Release Visibility Round - where an ad is placed on the Steam Front Page or other notable areas where potential interested parties may see it until either 30 days have passed or 500K "impressions" have been spent - lasted a whole 58 minutes and garnered 680K views.

After 24 days of the max 30, Monsters Loot Swag has managed ...

 ... a little short of 90K views in three weeks. Big oof.

Of course this may just be the normal fate of the "Literally Who No-Name Indie Devs" - narrator: "Yes it is", but of course there is another reason for this and that is quantity of releases, each of which gets it's turn to be viewed on strategically placed ads on Steam.

When Airship Dragoon released back in 2014 there were 1700 games released that year, and just last year there were over 18000 (checking I got the correct number of zeros).

That's a lot of competition for eyeballs for Mr. Literally Who

 Way back in 2014 I was baffled why a visibility round had a cut off point of 30 days. Well, now we know, because Valve obviously had the presience to think ahead.

 I must say that I was surprised at the interest from the Far East, which apparently dwarfed anything from Europe, to the point that no European country made the top 10 views. In fact most of the Curator Connect messages I have recieved are from Far Eastern countries whose primary language is not what Monsters Loot Swag has been translated to. I don't mind using Valve's offical Curator system to hand out keys as long as the group actual has some reviews recently. Way back in the day, long before Valve had the curator system in place, I would email out keys to dodgy folks thinking the worst that could happen was someone got a free copy of Airship Dragoon - I didn't realize that they were selling these things on equally dodgy key reseller sites. So once again, Gaben had the presience to come up with a system that helps to reduce that.

 Anyhow, onwards and upwards ... or probably more like, onwards and sideways or at least splashing about in the same place ...

I am currently preparing for Monsters Loot Swag NG+, a big update that will add a whole host of new challenge modes for those who complete the game and fancy another playthrough with a variety of different flavours. That and some late level bug fixes.

And some bug fixes, because spawning infinite golden taels probably wasn't what I meant to do

 In other news, I had locked Monsters Loot Swag into a late 2024 build of the free and open source game engine, Torque3D, whilst rolling in the occaisonal bug fix from later versions. There had been somewhat of a change as to how client control object creation works on server connection, which took a while to pick through and understand. Whilst non of that matters to Monsters Loot Swag, which can use it's own system just fine, I thought it was important to bring myself up to speed on the latest and greatest methods the engine uses, and took some time out to port to the latest engine version, my Elden Ring style melee gameplay tech demo, which is probably going to be my next project.

 In the meantime, here's the new Monsters Loot Swag Release Trailer! Happy Catgirl Cosplaying!
(^._.^)

 

Intro The Outro

 

Final Release Is Soon™

 Monsters Loot Swag gets it's final release soon - very soon. In fact 8th March 2025 if all goes according to plan keikaku. Not that anything has ever gone according to keikaku but that just seems to all be part of the wonderful world of indie game development ... but we are hopeful on this one ... 

The game received it's last big update on Steam, which fixed a few more bugs, tweaked some stuff and turned the higher poly poorly UV mapped catgirls into lower poly and infinitely better UV mapped catgirls. The whole "Souvenir" system is now live, and souvenirs drop from Monster Boss kills at a random rate, based on game difficulty and level progression. With this last bit of code and art complete, now all the available Steam Achievements are achievable.

 The game even now has an actual ending - well two endings, one for victory, which also gives the player the opportunity to continue playing in Endless Mode, were the difficulty ramps up even further as the levels restart, scoring is multiplied and Boss Monsters spawn before the Level Exit is complete. The other ending is the fail state, which is more likely on the law of averages, when the player is delivered the sad looking catgirl of butt whooped. Cue sad catgirl noises.

And here is what the fail state end screen looks like.

 These "plot" sequences all required a bit of Twillex, which is a system of animation called "tweening" that involces "tweens" which are a series of terms, that as a middle age man, I would not like to have on my internet search history. It actual means moving one image state to another, and after a bit of practise and good old maths, allows for some pretty nice scrolling, spinning and resizing of a static image.

 So the only thing left to complete is the animated "Intro Sequence", that will finally reveal the game's narrative "PLOT". I left this until last because, "reason why" didn't seem anyway near as important as "game actually working".

 The Intro Sequence has taken a lot of drawing, even with just mostly static frames and a lot of synchronizing audio - and there has been a lot more audio required than originally planned, as staring at a sequence of storyboarded images in relative silence just feels like it's missing something.

There are a few visual and audio gags and some references in the transmute/transformation sequence - which naturally every magical girl must have - preferably fan service heavy and complete with sparkles - lots of sparkles. This includes a reference to Battle Of The Planets - which I absolutely loved as a five year old in the late 1970s, and a parody of Kill La Kill (which to be honest I can't say the same for).

It's May tomorrow, the fifth month of the Space Year 2025, and it promises to be a scorcher ... that will then be followed by the resuming of normal service and thermal pants weather once again, and that's before any despot fills the sky with clouds of acid.

The Great Rebranding

Monsters Loot Swag - rebranded

 The Great Rebranding of Monsters Loot Swag is upon us.

I decided with full release from Early Access due soon™ that the main brand artwork would benefit from being in the same style as all the other character portrait art, and so set about coming up with a new paintings. This is also the style which the intro and outro sequences will take - and that itself is currently the immediate ongoing work, and really the last thing to do before full release.

Early Access has alas not worked out as I had originally hoped for, being immediately lost into a sea of being ignored, but then I expect that this is just how it goes for the average no-name indie devs launching early access games.

One thing modeling related which I have been doing amongst the veritable onslaught of drawing, has been to retopographize some of my earlier catgirl models. Previously I had used a Blender3D plugin to automate highpoly models down to lower tris counts. Whilst that had saved quite a lot of time, the tris count was still rather high considering the game is a top-down shooter with the characters being fairly small on screen, and the resulting UV maps were horrible strips, not the sort of thing that could ever be considered modder friendly.

Left: Automated; Right: Manual Retopology

 I had used the custom generic player character which I had manually retopologized from April 2024, and this itself reduced polycount by around 60% of what the automated plugin did, all whilst preserving human readable UV maps. I find that due to the small size of the player model on screen, that baking ambient occlusion into the albedo/colour map improves how it looks, even though ambient occlusion still takes place inside the PBR ORM map (occlusion, roughness, metal).

The generic retopologized human character model

So, once again it was a case of do not send a machine to do a man's job ... and all of the presumed labour-saving of yesteryear had been for naught. So now, I am the proud owner of 8 lowerpoly catgirls who all weigh in around 4-6K triangles.

In frog related news I have been forced to put netting over the frog pond as my local murder of corvids have been committing murder in the frogpond. 🐸 

I have been feeding the crows for a while and they've always been very friendly so this sudden turn of events was completely uncalled for. They're big fans of that awful US style burger cheese (wouldn't touch the stuff myself) and also rather fond of monkey nuts, when they're not getting gristly bits of steak or other cutoffs. Also I've seen them beat up Herring Gulls which is what I really want them hanging around for.

So that was the month of March space year 2025, and my efforts to finish off the fluff piece of explaining an actual plot for Monsters Loot Swag continues, taking up much drawing and GUI planning, with all still on course to ship in April.

 

Gameplay Complete, Release Soon™

Hollólány The Final Boss of Monsters Loot Swag, and this isn't even her final form

 Monsters Loot Swag is gameplay complete. All the levels and the level bosses, and the playerable cosplaying catgirl characters are finished. All that remains is some rebranding for release - which is planned for April now, so as not to clash with the Steam Spring Sale - and make an intro and outro sequence with PLOT!

Currently I am finishing off the Souvenir Screen. Souvenirs are now coded and modeled, they are a collectable item dropped by Level Bosses with an RNG modifier based on level progress and game difficulty. Each level Souvenir collected, unlocks an item in the Souvenir Screen, in the "Stats And Achievements" section. With Souvenirs now available, the final Achievements can also now be unlocked.

Work In Progress - The Souvenir Collection Screen, currently devoid of Souvenirs

The Souvenir Collection Screen artwork will also feature as the basis for rebranding of the game box art and packages, as it is more in keeping with the 2D art style used throughout the game for characters, whether playable or enemies.

Once this artwork is complete, all that will remain is for an intro sequence to explain why there are monsters, loot and swag - and a game complete outro sequence when (if) the player finally emerges victorious. This will all be done in the same 2D art style that appears throughout the game, and will be displayed as semi-animated storyboarding.

Behold the tiniest amount of frogspawn

 In other news, frogs have arrived! I was wondering where the frogs had got to considering that they were 13 days overdue from last year's arrival time. Well, someone has turned up, and deposited the smallest clump of frogspawn which I have ever seen. And now it has ice on it because the nights have reverted to freezing clear skies, so I'm not expecting to see any more frogs in the next week, but hopefully normal service will be resumed shortly and there will be more tapioca pudding than pond.

🐸
 

Space Year 2025

 🎵 In the year 2525 ... if man is still alive ... 🎵

Well I feel barely alive in the year 2025 ... mostly due to having come down with the lurgy ... or the space lizards frying my brain with their invisible doom ray - sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Fun Fact: I met the guy who did the intro to that song and my dad jammed with him a few times.

Work to complete Monsters Loot Swag continues in earnest. With all of the cosplaying catgirl characters that the player can unlock and control now compelte, it all comes down to designing the final level and final level boss.

For the last map I've gone for a HR Giger / Z Beskinski surealist horror aesthetic. This has required me to make a lot of custom textures, which have been taking up the greatest part of this, the first month of the year. After a while I found my eyes going funny looking at all this stuff.

The Final Countdown With The Final Level

All the rank and file enemies for the final level were designed some time ago, and naturally there will be tentacles, for, as we all know, tentacles are the natural predator of overly excitable catgirls. Once the final level is complete I need to make the level boss and then just a bit more 2D artwork for the randomized "souvenir" system which is already in place and comes with three whole Steam Achievements.

After that I think I'll do a little rebranding of the Steam capsules with some new artwork.

And then it's shipping, come hell or high water.

Early Access has been somewhat disappointing without a single useful crash report in the forums, but alas I expect this is just the price of being a brokeass non-name indie dev in a literally sea of brokeass no-name indie devs. The most useful thing was when the engine got updated to give me feedback on misnamed script errors, something the script IDE alas doesn't. This helped me fix a fair few wrongly named or non-established local variables, the sort of thing that could and probably did cause crashes.

I still have all my Steam Visibility Rounds available for full release, so we will see if that helps boost eyes on at final release time. I remember it working quite well for Airship Dragoon but that was 10 years ago with considerably less released products jostling for attention. Anyhow, we won't know until we launch.

So next game ... how to get eyes on game at release? Early Access gets drowned out so I'm thinking maybe an open beta? Just let folks actually have a play around with a basic but working build and see if they fancy wishlisting it? Well it's a thought, and I don't have any others that cost zero dollars, so we'll probably go down that route.

January is over already, that's like 8 percent of the year gone, which is about as horrifying as it already being Space Year 2025.

Anyhow, back to going googly eyed with Gigeresque texturing ... 🥴