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!
(^._.^)