February has arrived ... and by the time you are reading this, it has also gone. But not before Monsters Loot Swag got a huge update on Steam, and has been ported to a completely new engine build.
This included finally retiring the old engine build and replacing it with the latest game engine build, complete with all of those 21st Century shiny things like an asset system, HDR lighting, Physical Based Rendering of reflections and so much more. The changlog itself ran to some 36 items.
In other game development news, I also ported my old "Aeronauticals" proof of concept demo to the latest engine version. You can download and play that here and watch me do just that below.
February 2024 is a Leap Year! And soon to be leaping are what is in this pond! 🐸
However since this arrived there has not been much froggy activity due to the weather reverting to being bloody freezing for the last few weeks. Thankfully it looks set to become milder and much croaking was heard earlier.
So that was the month with a strange number of days, and all because two despots mangled the perfectly working 10 month calendar by inserting their egos into new months and totally throwing time out of order every 4 years.
So, annoyingly, I somehow missed November devblog, being the first month missed in 4 years. Bloody Embuggeration!
Not doubt I was otherwise engaged with a number of updates to Monsters Loot Swag on Steam, and trying to get the new level knocked out. This not only had Level 6 and it's monster boss, Kaeru The Horticulturist, as pictured above, but also a final fix of a long running bug issue, the dreaded "Out Of Bounds Index Array" which I had previously narrowed down to some sort of audio issue. And, eventually I had it cornered and trapped, and finally fixed, Audio Emitters had been getting their ghosting out of synch. The simplest solution was to create a delay in turning them off and then deleting them, but this had taken months of investigation.
Literally ALL the printf
With all the bugs - that I am aware of anyhow - finally vanquished, I could finish off the newest level, finalize the missing portrait artwork for the previous level boss monsters, and get on with expanding the game. I am now on the 9th Early Access update to the game, and the fourth major update.
Level 5 Monster Boss, Lula The Non-Resident Alien
And so that is where we are now, with the game running well and up to speed, waiting for completion of levels 6-10 and the remaining 4 unlockable catgirl cosplayers ... and a few other things such as the Souvenir system I have planned, where boss monsters drop a collectable via RNG with a difficulty setting modifier.
All that and more is planned for the new year, with a final completion of the game between late Spring and early Summer. After this I might code up a melee based combat system for a hack-and-slash-cum-Soulslike to see how that works, before deciding on whether to use that as my next project or the Aeronaut vertical slice I made a year or two back.
If you have fully recovered from that horrifying experience, let's talk PBR. But first ...
Not really that different, but my aeronauticals/dogfighting game is on haitus. After working on it for a full year, I have moved back to my previous game of catgirl carnage swag it up. The reason I spent the last year on the arcade aircraft game was that I needed a break from the twin-stick shooter featuring leggy ladies with fluffy ears due to burnout - see the blog entitled, "A change is as good as a rest" from last year.
Well it's been a change rather than a rest and I managed to create a full working concept for arcade style aerial combat, which I expect to return to sometime in the future. However, for now it's back to all-action catgirl shooty collectathon because it's a lot closer to completion than aeronauticals and since it's been a whole EIGHT YEARS since Airship Dragoon was launched and it's almost embarrassing that I have failed to ship anything in that time.
I've got a new app id from steam and have been busy installing steamworks for the game on my local PC. This has taken a bit of extra work, mostly due to the fact that I couldn't remember anything about getting a game working for Steam because I haven't done it in said 8 years.
Originally catgirl twin-stick swagathon shooter was called AoT ("Always on Time") ... which I dropped and renamed it "Swag It Up", a rather more to the point title. Don't go looking on Steam yet, I haven't sorted the store front out yet so it's not listed, I have just integrated steamworks locally for testing.
Now for that PBR ...
Now the engine has a new asset browsing system, which is apparently all the rage and the cool kids can't live without it. Obviously I hate the entire thing but that's the future for you; I was promised flying cars and holidays on Mars, instead I get texture memory leaks and assets overloading their materials from their own asset file instead of using my predefined materials - which are still the ones that show up in the material editor even though the other ones are the ones getting loaded.
I redesigned my swag markers
Once I had found all of this out it was simply a case of opening each asset's file and removing the material reference that was interfering with my existing materials. This was somewhat of a pain in bum due to me having huge numbers of assets/models, all of which had to be individually and manually edited.
Shiny PBR is shiny
So next up is to finish off the remaining PBR conversions and then go about porting the actual game logic to the latest Preview4 engine build. I think I will however upload the current working Dx11 but not PBR version of the game to steam for initial online testing.
The main thing to get done is sorting out the Steam store page and get it listed. This requires a trailer video and some screenshots, but most importantly I need to draw some good store front box art to advertise the game and also use as a main menu background. I also need artwork for the character portrait selection screen.
As for aeronauticals, it may well return one day and be completed and shipped. So here's a full video of the first mission.
Happy Halloween and don't have nightmares about global debt.
