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.

 

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.

🐸
 

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 ... 🥴