Anniversary 10 Years On Steam

  

Airship Dragoon has been on Steam for 10 whole years. Even Albert Spier only got 30 years in Spandau ...

To celebrate this monumental event I put the game on discount of a whoppinh 95% ... but Steam only allowed a 94% discount due to transaction charges converting into US dollars. So 94% it was, slightly odd number that it is.

One of the interesting things that I found was that the Far East of Korea, Japan and China did make the top 10 for sales. This was especially gratifying as I knew there were plenty of pirated copies in the early days floating around China due to the amount of traffic my website got to download the additional map pack.

In other news, August draws to a close. A month of scorchio sunshine, sitting out by the veg patch, absorbing vitamin D in non-capsule form and sewing myself a medieval bag hag (summer pattern), going to make a winter one with felt to ward of hypothermia later. 

Alas the baking sun meant that the veg patch was going bone-dry, especially as the water barrels had been emptied. Roll on some rain, in fact after the utter soaking for the first half of the year, if it could just have kept a bit back for mid-August instead of swinging from "I need to build an Ark" to "I need a Thumper to distract the sandworms", it would have been appreciated.

Behold my mighty carrot crop! That was it ...

 When it finally did rain it did at 3.30am, so I was outside changing water barrels over with a coat over my jim-jams. If anyone has a working weather control machine who is not CIA, please could I have some more rain.

I also updated the demo for Monsters Loot Swag, to the most modern working build of the game. The old version of the demo had been removed due it being built with Ye Olde game engine version which predated Torque3D 4.0 and the fancy asset system and PBR (Physical Based Rendering) materials.

In other indie game dev news, I finally fixed all the networking jitter I had previously been fighting ... by simply ripping out the custom player class code I had written and using an actual seperate camera system. I had always had a sneaking suspicion that trying to go through the player class and directly use the player object's own cam/eye node might not be the best way of doing things, and in the end, said sneaking suspicion was more jumping up and down suspicion with total loss of stealth abilities.

I decided to use the Open Source 3D Action Adventure Kit camera system as a base, and after a bit of modding I got it to work with my existing lock-on target system. Behold - moving AI who have been locked on by both hosting client and remote client - now without any jitter!

So that was August, and now we will be onto September, named after the Greek "sept" meaning seven, because it's the seventh month ... or at least was until two despots added new months after the sixth one, and conveniently named said months after themselves ...

Anyway, next up on the dev frontier, Monsters Loot Swag only needs 1 more level with enemy boss, and 2 more unlockable players making, before a bit of tidying up to finish it off. I am not in a rush however, as I would rather ship in early to mid 2025, and thus give myself time to get the next game concept furthered more, hopefully to the point of having some real gameplay and a store page available for coming soon™.

As my previous attempt to drum up interest with the Monsters Loot Swag early access release didn't achieve any support, I might try an open beta next time.