Space Year 2025 Comes To An End

There Is Gold In Them There Hills!

 Space Year 2025 comes to an end, and this month I have mostly been fleshing out the world of warbands. This has required some low poly rocks scattering at various intervals and a some ruins, bridges and castles. Gotta have a castle in a medieval hack and slasher.

Colourful Heather To Break Up The Monotony Of Green

 Whilst adding all these extra things help make the landscape more interesting, it also creates the more "stuff" means the more stuff for the Ai to walk into and get stuck. Behold navMesh for pathfinding!

Now it has been a good 10 years since I used recast, for Airship Dragoon, so I did need a bit of trial and error to get it to build reasonably sized grids. After a bit of pathfinding testing I determined it had a nasty tendency to fail to get to the target point on particularly long or complicated paths (bridge? What bridge?), and so ended up adding some waypoint markers which will (hopefully) act as a guide for the wonky path. However it looks like I will be having to check this manually as "we made a path but it doesn't actually go to the end point" does appear to happen some times, especially when a bridge is involved. 

Fun With Pathfinding

 

Apart from that it has been Christmas, which has required a certain amount of eat, drink and be merry ... all of which has been somewhat fatiguing and I will be glad to get back to normal service has been resumed and don't have to hear overly jolly Christmas music everytime I stop outdoors.
 

One Ruin, One Bridge, One Castle

Steam is having another NextFest at the end of February but I reckon that the time frame for getting a working demo out is too tight, never mind clearing the store and app review hurdles. I am not particularly concerned as I don't think that NextFest adds anything to discoverability and if you aren't already bringing your pre-collected audience over it's all potluck if you get a new following.

Bonfire Lit, Grace Touched, Do You Have A Permit For That Campfire, Etc

 Space Year 2025 comes to an end, and during it I made the final release of twin-stick catgirl carnage shooter Monsters Loot Swag and added NG+ ... neither of which garnered any attention and all visibility rounds expired long before they were used up. However that is just the nature of the beast now. 

So the plan from now on is smaller, faster development cycles leading to shipping every 18-24 months or so, rather than labouriously iterating on something on and off for a decade only to release and hope I make my 100 bucks steam app cost back. Knight Errant/Warband World/Whatever I am going to end up calling it, is the first test of this. Whilst Early Access did not garner any enthusiasm or bug reporting help, I am probably going to go down the Open Beta route and see if that helps gather any players, before perhaps another attempt at Early Access in the same vein as Vampire Survivors, sell it for a few bucks and then finish it off 6 months later.

Hello Space year 2026.