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.

🐸