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.