RIP My Strawberry Patch

There is a reason as to why I spend as much time as possible parked bollock naked outdoors, lounging by the veg patch, glass of (increasingly cheap - cost of living crisis / flagging sales / bad luck / terminal syphilis / name the James Coburn reference / etc, etc) plonk in hand and that is because of the unpredictable summers on Meme Weather Island (we used to rule the world, you know).

Here's a picture of a cut to break things up - not game related

Well it's been crap (again) and insesant (how many S's and in which order?) deluges have washed out the delicate summer fruits which barely got the chance to wither on the vine. Last year I was inundated with strawberries to the point of complaint and this year; nada. Circle of life, etc etc.

Meanwhile in the indie game development world; I have continued to port over Monsters Loot Swag to the new engine build. Art assets - mainly texutre images - had all been redone and modified as you can read from last months glorious endevours; as you can read here. And, yes, I also complain about the weather in that blog too ...

This is a cat pretending to be a dog, pretending to be a seal - not game related

This has left me to "just" - a euphemism that does not seem to carry the appropriate weight - update and transfer all of the gameplay scripts. Doing this in a methodical manner has been a long, dull, and extracting process, however I have discovered - and fixed - a considerable number of bugs, enough to make a new build patch of the game on their own, which you can see here.

Since posting that update I have hunted down and squashed more bugs and issues, which will be included in the next update. I have also ported a whole raft of shaders to the new version of the engine which can be found here.

Next up is to port over all of the user interface screens and get them working with a new input system before I can release a beta depot of the new engine build.

Tomorrow is September, and apparently Meme Weather Island is going back to 24C now that I have packed the summer shorts away ... so I'm not putting the Autumn duvet on just yet.

This is cat(girl) drinking coffee

Monsters Loot Swag

 

Monsters Loot Swag -> Blast Monsters -> Win Loot -> Get Swag!

Available for Wishlist on Steam now. Coming Soon(ish)™.

So I finalized my Steam Store Page, and had a name change. It has monsters, loot and swag so ... it does exactly what it says on the tin!

As the game plays fully but is not complete on the artwork side, with the later half of boss monsters and level designs being placeholder only, I decided to try my hand at the "Early Access" route. This means that the game will ship with a disclaimer that I am still working on it, and it will be periodically updated until completion.

I've also been working with someone else, helping to create an engine integrated module for the Steamworks API so that everything could be utilized via game engine scripts rather than being hardcoded in C++ by per game.

I also took the time to upgrade an old resource that someone else had created of a free postFx Shader Library from DirectX9.0c to Dx11 and then to the latest Preview build of Torque3D 4.0.

Night Vision with noise

Chromatic Aberration - the most hated of shaders ...

Pixelation, for when you want your expensive GPU to pretend it's a 1989 console

In fact most of the month has been shaders and effects ... only for me to discover some gaping problems with my approach and dash into a phone booth to emerge with a flowing cape and my underpants outside of my tights as Captain Workaround!

Wow did I get this gif to nearly loop properly?

Next up is actually uploading a workable version of the game to Steam. This is likely to be the Dx11 pre-PBR version as it is the latest fully working one, though it still requires a bit of GUI (Game User Interface) work for it to be player friendly. A lot of stuff happened this month but most of it was not very image postable.

So that was the month that was, the first month of SPACE YEAR 2022 when I was promised flying cars but instead got a report about a cake that didn't even mention whether it had marzipan or not ...

Character Selection Screen

So I've knocked up a character selection screen that, currently is rather devoid of any art work. It's failry simple, uses an array which the player can flick through, each character (currently a whole 2) then display an image of the character (which is currently a placeholder) and more importantly a series of statistics relating to the character at the side. These include the basics such as speed of movement, health and energy replenishment and strength for pushing enemies aside. This is followed by the 3 types of attack and evade, and their relevant statistics, so the player can move through character selection and view the differing statistics for comparison.

I have since changed the buttons to something less awful using a bitmap array and text.

Having finally dispensed with DirectX 9.0c in favour of DX11 and OpenGL, I set about converting some of my custom shaders with ... not particular success.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that isn't supposed to look like that ... This appears to have something to do with hardware skinning being controlled by the GPU when previously it was the CPU. As this only affects a few things I have come up with some workarounds for the fancy custom materials and will come back to this at a later date.

I've also had more of a play around with my XP-Pen display tablet and started to become familiar with the artist app Krita. I am planning on using this for the 2D art in game, and especially the selection screen for character portraits.

Drawing of an old oil painting I did some time years ago.

I also thought about reworking the artwork for Airship Dragoon, and knocked up a colour sketch idea for composition. Might not actually replace the original artwork but could use a new one for Steam's new capsule formats for updates - then again I could go the whole hog and use it for complete new rebranding.

 

I also did a whole load more stuff this month but can't actually remember what it was ...

 

Anyhow, onwards and upwards ...

Fancy Pants Stuff

Disclaimer: Blog post does not actually contain any pants which are fancy.

So another yeah towards the universe's doom lurches into existence. I made a whole 5 blog posts last year - 60% of them in February ... ahem ...

I finally updagraded my 10 year old Dell to a new all singing, all dancing, super-computer of a dev machine.

In other news I survived the Great Yorkshire Earthquake which wreaked widespread devastation.

Anyhoo - back to dev:

I finally completed 104 icons, which like everything else to do with indie game development, took far longer than it should have.

I also made a few changes to the HUD to try and finalize a layout. I merged the energy system for heavy attack and special evade into a single recharging system with collectable bonuses to increase the recharge rate.

For fancy effects I started playing around with a little shader code which found to give objects a distortion similar to Predator style camouflage or the invisible demons in ye olde Doom.

It's still a bit of a work in progress for optical camo but after a few additions to explosion code (code here) makes some nice shockwave ripple effects. See the two videos below and look carefully for the magnified turbulence shockwaves.

 

 

So ... onwards and upwards. Development is getting to the stage where I'll soon be swapping out the placeholder items and modeling and animating some actual art assets. To be continued! - hopefully with posts that are more regular than 2016 ...

Swag Em Up - 100 Collectable Power-Ups

It took some doing, but I managed to design and code, a full 100 collectable power-ups. Most of the artwork is still placeholder but all bonuses, attributes, special attacks, etc work in practice.

They come in 6 flavours:

• ATTACK - bonus event on striking an enemy. eg: critical damage, exploding attack
• DEFEND - bonus event on being hit. eg: shield stops damage, retribution attack against enemy
• TEMPORARY - boost to attributes for x seconds. eg: for 8 seconds speed x2, increased healing
• PERMANENT - attribute increments. eg: increment health, speed, healing
• PASSIVE - works passively. eg: cause damage on touch, enemies drop more loot
• ITEM - Items are single use and player can use any item that they have collected when they wish. Can be good for getting out of trouble when your back is to the wall.

So here's some pics and videos of a few of more of them being tested. See last blog for previous ones.

 Bonus offensive machine-gun and grenade spam attacks.

Super Orbital Laser (anyone guessing the source of the name wins a free internet)

The Zone of Brass Monkies - slows all enemy who enter it.

Napalm Strike (need to work on those particles, not entirely satisfied with those flames)

And a quick test of shields in various colours.

I also spent some time reading through the code (this is why it's important to leave comments people!) and found a few things I didn't previously know about explosions - such as you can tie animated meshes to them. This help save a bit of overhead on things as in Airship Dragoon I had spawned "concussion blast spheres" seperately. So I decided to make the basic impact attack a little more interesting.

With the swag collectables coded if not modeled, next up is to test my ideas on how to actually model the environment and levels. And it looks something a little bit like this:

Shader Play

Worked out how to get better looking and less over-the-top normal maps. Started having a quick mess with shaders like emissive and glow, giving some tracer which really traces.



Also think I've worked out a level/environment building solution that should look good without sacrificing performance.

Now to try and port over all my AI scripts.