Monsters Loot Swag Early Access Update 2

This is Pauk The Engineer, she drives Mecha-Boris, the Spidertank. Spidertank, spidertank, does whatever a spidertank does ...

September saw two Regular Updates for Steam in one month, but that mostly because I brought early October's update forward a day to coincide with Friday and the start of the weekend.

Regular Update 1 did pretty much what I said it would in August's blog; the main emphasis was on the player requested radar system so players could find each other in online Co-Op multiplayer mode, and the rest of the update was tweaks and bug fixes.

Regular Update (because that's what Steam calls them) 2 has just shipped, and as this was the first update to have an actual month of work available since launching last month, it has a whopping 50 fixes, improvements, changes and new content.

I forgot I wasn't in developer mode on Steam, got killed, and permadeath erased my own save file - bugger ...

 The main focus for this was to revitalize level 5 and turn it into a broken industrial aesthetic, complete with shattered piping system leaking toxic goo (not a comment on current events). I also fixed the chatHud so that players can talk to each other in multiplayer game mode, whilst waiting for the game to start, and after the level is complete and everyone is waiting the 60 seconds before the next level loads.

There was also a whole load of balancing and bug fixes, and the portrait and loading screen for the level 3 Monster Boss, Pauk; see above. One of the changes was to drop the Shipping Build from the executable which I have long had suspicions causes instability (like 10+ years), crashing when any other build would have managed to get through the error alright. This also allows for the player to access the console, which can be useful when they come across a bug because they can then send me the console.log text file and I can see where the script loop got up to - and I am a dev who likes a lot of script echo to log to find out what is happening (printf too).

And here is a video of what Level 5 looks like, though I decided to remove the ground fog in the end.

So that was the month that was, I removed the summer duvet in favour of the thicker Autumn one. Next month I will probably be working on a whole new level for Monsters Loot Swag; the Water Temple. Ninty plz no sue.

Monsters Loot Swag Steam Release

 

Monsters Loot Swag officially released as an "Early Access" title on Steam, and was immediately drowned under an ocean of gay, furry porn. Such is life. Early Access titles do not have access to Steam's marketing visibility rounds, which are only visible upon full release.

Naturally with any new title release, an emergency hot patch fix was uploaded within the first 24 hours, for a bug which had never happened in any of the previous years of development.

And thankfully was not too difficult to hunt down and squash

 Cue begging emails for free keys, including "pay us money and we'll give you a one word review on Steam's Curator system". lol no. I did send off a few keys via Steam Curator to groups which looked like they might fit the bill.

I did however get some feedback, that players in online multiplayer Co-Op mode wanted a radar so that they could find each other. And there wish was my command! Taking the ghosts from the local connection I could get the locations of the other players and their status, so dead players who need resusitating can be displayed with a different icon from alive players. I made the radar range fairly small, a couple of hundred metres and had players beyond that appear at the edge of the radar so that they are always visible. As the player gets closer the icons fade as they move towards the centre of the radar.

Here's the initial video of that in action, minus the fading.

So we shall continue, gearing up for the first month post release update, which will actually be 2 weeks after launch and thus a smaller update than the ones to come. This smaller update is mostly about some bugfixes and quality of life improvements, as well as the portraits of the Level 2 Monster Boss (above in desktop format), Lapin The Ranger.

Next month will be solely about working towards the first major update.

Demonstarting Demo Steam Next Fest

Brilliant Advertising That Gets Straight To The Point

Steam Next Fest is a thing where desperate indie devs big and small plead with Joe Public to notice their upcoming game and add it to their Wishlist. It runs for a whole week from Monday the 13th of June and Monsters Loot Swag will be there, with a playable demo - that I am still hammering the bugs out of ...

At some point during this Steam Next Fest, I will be streaming on the Monsters Loot Swag Steam Store Page (if I can get it to work - even Valve say it's awkard as hell in their documentation) to demonstrate the game and I dare say ramble incoherently about things ... probably 8pm BST on Tuesday 14th, and again for a late night comfy playthrough at 11pm BST on Thursday 16th.

 The playable demo has the first level available in Single Player, or Online Multiplayer (or LAN for those strange folks who have physical friends in the real world) and now features THREE player Co-Op (4 in the full game) and the new character "Bikaver".

Melee Based Wine Drinking

 Bikaver is a close-range, melee based character. She likes long walks in the rolling hills, eating grey cattle salami, drinking red wine and dealing out blunt force trauma.

Bikaver has a trio of hand-to-hand standard attacks, features high mobility, with high strength for knocking monsters out of the way. Her special attack is a low damage but wide area attack which stuns all enemies, whilst her evasion is the fearsome - and instantanious - Huzzar Charge, propelling herself through multiple ranks of monsters, both stunning and damaging all in her path.

 She also got a character profile redesign because I didn't like the first one.

 Monsters Loot Swag even runs on Valve's new handheld console Steam Deck ... apparently, I mean I don't actually have one.

And here is the first glimpse of Multiplayer Co-Op mode in action - with low audio because I forgot to turn the volume up for recording ... and then I forgot to turn off the video after we both got killed so half of it is a character screen whilst I was chatting on discord.

Plz wishlist Monsters Loot Swag on Steam!

Takes Two To Tango With A Brief Debrief

Having mostly been a single player player ... stops, rereads that, nah we're good ... the concept of networking multiple clients wasn't something that I had particularly much experience with. This was most obvious when reviewing my C++ code and seeing that I had literally packed/unpacked everything of my custom aeronautVehicle class regardless of whether it required it or not. On further inspection only rigidBody attitude and whether it should be emitting vapour or not really needed to passed around every frame the engine updated. This could probably explain the jitteriness of Ai and other client aircraft movements.

Debugging ... (don't @ me!)

After quite a bit of faffing around I not only managed to get 4 player Co-Op mode working but had it so that other remote human clients could arrive after the mission had started, and replace the allied AI who had already spawned in their place. The Ai would smoothly disengage, move away and fade out before being deleted, hopefully out of view of other players.

Any later joining client would have to pick the remaining available flights/callsigns that human players were permitted at the briefing screen. Initially I had listed each and every callsign individually, but once I had the whole system up and running, I decided it would be better to simply list available wings and the number of taken and free roles within them. This would cut down on the possibility of scrolling through vast numbers of disabled buttons.

Co-Op Mode! Player 1 and 2 look at each other during a flypast.

The briefing screen also acted as a rather rudimentary lobby. Players could arrive and choose their flight roles, aircraft and paint job, and then wait for the server to fill. Once two or more players had arrived and selected their aircraft and were ready to sortie, a countdown timer would start and automatically trigger the mission so they weren't waiting around for ever. A lone player, waiting on the server on their own could start the mission with Ai wingmen, and future arriving players could drop in and drop out as replacement, as explained above.

One of the things which had proven to be an issue with the networking was briefing. Sending huge amounts of text over a client connection seems like rather a bad thing and I have been desperate not to abuse seven shades out of the commandToClient. This is the reason that I haven't got a large and indepth mission briefing description working yet. I am considering creating it as a seperate GUI file and sending that directly to the player in the same way mission download should work. I do however have a quick description of mission objectives created, pulling them directly out of the mission file.

Lies, Damn Lies And Statistics

 The post mission debriefing screen lists all the statistics that pertain to the player. All allied aircraft are listed as well as their victories, recorded as kills and assists, and their final state which descibes their damage. Added to this is the individual client's performance which ... when I iron out the bugs ... will list the types of kills and assists they scored as well as how accurate they were with their weapons. Right now ... it's a tad buggy ...

More Lies And Bugs Than Statistics ...

Here's a video of the old way I selected playable flights with the multiple buttons at the beginning, and shows how the briefing screen works for aircraft and paint scheme choice.

And so that was the month that was. August, it was wet and cold and not much of an end to summer. The summer fan is dismantled and stored for next year, and the Autumn duvet is already on the bed for maximum comfy.

Space Year 2020 And CO-OP Mode Works

The first month of Space Year 2020 is over. Which is kind of annoying as I always bemoan a month passing in the face of my meagre endeavours. However January has been rather productive.

I created muzzle flashes for the stock player character's weapons. Apparently there is a way to do this in Max using mesh visibility animations ... but Blender3D doesn't appear to have that so I had to fake it with the good old "make it really small and hide it inside the gun when not in use" approach.

 The gifts that keep on giving ... but not this much ...

I also went back and restructured a lot of the power ups. There is a rare power up which drops other temporary power ups - however I found this to be very overpowered, so I changed it to drop a small gift box which contains a 20 second buff to a single attribute - "buff" apparently being the correct terminology for this sort of thing. I also swapped a common single attack damage multiplier for a temporary damage booster that lasts 60 seconds.

The '80s called to remind everyone that it was the greatest decade in history ...

I also channelled my 1980s childhood for an Aliens themed range finder. This finds the nearest unopened swag parcel or node and informs the player of the distance. Originally I tried to get this information via the GUI itself before common sense prevailed that I should be getting it from the player object on the server and then send the result to the GUI so it was networkable.

 Me, myself and I ... and me again ...

Speaking of networkable, I finally tested 4 player co-op mode and it worked quite nicely ... until it all broke but then I fixed it and now it really does seem to work quite nicely. I created a little leader board so all the players can see how they did at the end of the level relative to each other. I had to rewrite how levels are loaded as my previous level loading was very much based around single player mode, but at least I have had the foresight to make all aspects of individual player progression networkable so has been no hitches in spawning clients in a new level with all their old swag.

I have made various other tweaks and additions too numerous to mention, though refractoring the difficulty curve was one. It now works much better in co-op and endless mode, when the player has finished the game but continues to replay through the original 10 levels.

One thing I finally got around to finishing was the model for the Terror Tower item, which creates a zone of protection that the player can hide in. It's a tower of gibbets with severed heads that scares monsters away.

Too Spooky - even for monsters!

After putting on half a stone over Christmas, all of which seemed to congregate in a band around my waist I went for a good 70 miles worth of hiking this month. I am still the same weight but the middle tyre has gone so I guess it's turned into muscle somewhere and now my leg really hurts. More hiking tomorrow but it's only 5 miles to a pub.

Anyhow, roll on 2020.