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 ... 🥴

Cosplaying Catgirl Characters Complete

Monsters Loot Swag; Final Playable Character

 As the year 2024 comes to completion, so has the list of playable characters for Monsters Loot Swag. Schiavona is the 8th playable cosplaying catgirl character and fourth and final character who has to be unlocked via achievements. She is a close range, melee based character, with fairly average physical statistics, but is very heavy on inflicting damage.

Cue video of her in action:

All that remains for work to complete the development of Monsters Loot Swag, is now the final level with boss character, and few art related pieces such as an intro containing plot, as if 8 playable cosplaying catgirls battling 8 waifu level bosses needs such flippery as plot!

Airship Dragoon has been on Steam for 10 years

Airship Dragoon got two updates at the beginning of December, the first was due to a new Steamworks SDK which had broken some of the 10 year old code for Steam integration, and the second was because, whilst testing the first update on Steam to make sure it actually worked ... I found a bug from 12 years ago ...

Thankfully, 12 years ago me ... who may still have been in his late 30s ... had left a code comment incase something happened that was not supposed to happen - and during this test of the new Steamworks code ... it happened.

The ancient code comment made it relatively simple to track the "something happened that was not supposed to happen" down to a specific function were pathfinding was sent if it completely failed - something so rare I had never had it happen, not anyone report it in the last decade, but I had not added an escape of any kind to this failure state, and so quickly scripted an emergency "move elsewere" command, so not to get stuck.

Rounding out the year work-wise, I finally filed my tax return with His Majesty's Robbers And Crooks (HMRC), something which the gubbermint has gone out of their way to make ever increasingly difficult. Their oh-so-helpful system active attempts to stop me from paying them money and every year I send feedback telling them that their crappy website has been broken for the last 7+ years and tell them how to fix it, every single year.

I ran out of characters typing into the complaint box

For 7+ years they have not done this

 

As it's Decemeber, and the time of eat, drink and get indegestion, I bought the biggest steak at a reasonable price that I could get.

Hello Vitamin B12!

 

Suitable Protective Clothing For Roasting Such A Beast

Went For Medium-Rare For Fear Of Some Folks Freaking Out If It Was Still "Bloody As Hell"

As Monsters Loot Swag comes to the end of it's development cycle, I naturally have one eye on the next project. Previously I had posted some of my test work on a third-person melee combat system. As my previous two projects have taken so long, I had been wondering about how best to make a short form game that could be expanded on if it received due interest from players.

I noticed that there had been quite a lot of complaints on the new Stalker game, about how it's open world design had broken it's previous a-life simulation, and I thought that maybe going down that route could be interesting - both in gameplay but also in coding the concept.

So, something along the lines of a 4km square map (not too big), with bands of enemy warriors from different areas or periods (Saxon, Norse, Magyar, Venetian, Chivalric, Landsknecht, etc) wandering about, picking fights, fleeing greater enemy forces, with a smattering of random loot and treasure chests, maybe some wild life plodding about.

I had a brief test to see the ballpark range of having lots of Ai players visible, having them invisible, not rendering but still having to update physics each engine tick. This was done in debug mode whilst running an IDE so naturally the framerate was terrible, but it did quickly prove what I had suspected, which is rendering 200 skinned meshes is a lot more overhead than just processing the physics for 200 Ai players.

 In a player build test without the overhead of debugging, the framerate was 500fps empty, 80fps with 200 characters rendering, and 350fps with 200 characters not rendering but still updating their physics. Not that I would ever consider having 200 Ai players battling it out right in front of the player's camera.

It will be interesting to see what sort of load I put on my processor and gpu if I remove the Ai players when they are nowhere near the player and turn them into scriptable objects who would then approximate their actions using RNG as they move around the map, out of the player/client camera fustrum and view range.

Anyhow, that is all for a later date. I hope you have had a Merry Christmas, and here's to Space Year 2025! 

Happy New Year!

 

New Playable Character STARSHIP

 

New Playable Character STARSHIP brings the 1950s sci-fi vibe

Monsters Loot Swag got a new update on Steam, with the seventh playable character - and third unlockable - STARSHIP, who arrives with a cheesy 1950s sci-fi vibe. Duck Dodgers eat your heart out.

Starship is a high mobility and range-based character, and the only Monsters Loot Swag character who can truly run-and-gun without needing to slow down and aim to shoot.

And here she is in action.

And whilst we're talking about sci-fi cheese ... feel free to sing-a-long with ex-Pan's People cum Hot Gossip dancers, which I had on 45 speed vinyl ... which was a thing when I was a kid. I pity the younglings these days who will never know such joys as Gen-X took for granted.

 They don't make them like that anymore ...

Lord and Protector Gaben released a new Steamworks SDK build, which streamlined how player stats and achievements were obtained by the game app, with all player statistics now loading via the Steam Client before the game is even launched. Naturally thsi broke all my code which communicated with Valve's servers, so that had to be fixed ... especially for Airship Dragoon which meant hunting through C++ which I had written over 10 years ago ... whew lad.

10 years later and Airship Dragoon has achieved "Mostly Positive" reviews

And it wouldn't be a devblog without complaining about the weather! Err Nerr Snerr!

It didn't last long, just long enough for me to almost go arse-over-tit on an icy path, before a tropical storm came in and rained winter off again.

Monsters Loot Swag and Airship Dragoon are both on sale in the Steam Autumn Sale right now.

Next up, probably the final playable character for Monsters Loot Swag, after which I only have the last level to make and a few extra bits to tidy up before full release next year.