Raven Errant Releases Early September

 

Raven Errant will release on Friday the 4th of September 2026, to be precise. At 8:14pm British Summer Time (GMT+1), or just after midday on the US Pacific Coast. It is releasing in Early Access, with half the warband factions complete (up tot he 11th Century) for heady price of  THREE US bucks (-10% launch discount).

And here is the official Release Trailer that is on the Steam Store Page.

One thing that I noticed about the Steam Review system this time around, is that they have really tightened up on the "All Ages Content". In the past a bit of claret getting splashed about, or a red decal on the ground (yes I had to age restrict images with red decals) didn't matter so much as long as it wasn't gratuitous. Also in game images might not always have been from the player's point of view, but they were in game, but not anymore - and "devcam" screenshots are now not allowed, only what the customer sees when they play it.

Valve were also very keen on the Early Access description being as nebuluous as possible, so I to remove my planned development roadmap from it and replace that with "I plan to increase the number of available teams/factions" without actually mentioning what they will be. Which I guess is fair enough as they need to cover themselves from "store page said X is coming and X never happened, gib refund 2 years later plz". With all these tweaks my Store Page went through a couple of cycles before getting passed as fit for human consumption.

My game build also had a a review knockback, but most of that was completely self-inflicted as my brain appeared to have melted at some point and was expecting in-game auto-generated save files to synch with Steam Cloud Saves, which of course need to synch before game launch. The solution was to include blank *.sav file in the build (and if you're saving outside of the steamApp folder? Then not sure.) and once uploaded to the depot, set the depot build vdf file to "FileExclusion" to *.sav files or else it will replace the End User's save file and that would be catastrophe.

Of course it wasn't always like this, and back in Ye Olden Steamwerks Dayes you had to manually synch all the data, which was good in a way because I could have Steamworks synch whilst my game's startup screens were loaded. However now it is all automated and preloads between the End User launching the app from the Steam Client, and the Steam actually launching the game. This creates a number of seconds of the splash screen display and nothing else happening - to the point that I have put a disclaimer on my splash screen to warn the User that "Steamworks is loading - please wait". 

August ends, and with September, Meteorological Autumn begins! Note this isn't real Autumn which happens on the Autumnal Equinox late September, this is just some Weather Forecaster trying to make the seasons an even split of months.

So we shall see if Raven Errant manages to acquire more sets of viewers eyes upon release, remembering the Monsters Loot Swag barely made 10% of it's allotted one million front page views over it's full release Visibility Rounds during 30 days. 

Time to re-read up on how to do Launch Day Store Page Streams.

Raven Errant

Coming Soon™

 "Raven Errant" is the name of my new game, who's development I have been showcasing on this blog for the last 12 months. It's a third person hack and slash were roaming bands of raiders move about campsites looking for loot and plunder, often from each other. 

The player starts off wearing a pair of comedy boxer shorts with a love heart print, and steals the clothes off corpses, flogs them in exchange for XP, and then upgrades their stats to equip better clothing, armour and weapons.

The player can enlist in these roving warbands - if they will have then, or they can  wander alone, picking off stragglers and leveling up to become a one man master of battle. There are some good reasons for enlisting, firstly safety in numbers, ask any school of fish, but also that if you follow a team around you get rewarded with free XP, making stat upgrading a little less of a hardship.

Friendly Carolingians are friendly

 Raven Errant will be launching as an Early Access title soon™, initially featuring 8 Raiding Parties which is around half the planned number, and in chronological order is from around the 5th Century (Avars) and up to the 11th Century (Normans). When complete there will be twice the number of Warbands and much more equipment, armour and weaponry will be available.

Raven Errant is currently waiting in review on Steam, so the Store Page is not live yet, but will hopefully be available in a week or so. 

Monsters Loot Swag - New Game Plus

Steam Summer Sale 2025

 Steam Summer Sale is upon us, and just in time for Monsters Loot Swag NG+ update!

This major update give a whole host of modifiers for repeat playthroughs (New Game +) , which can be selected individually or as multiples. Here's a quick rundown ... 

After completing the game by gaining Final Victory in the Final Level over the boss's Final Form, NG+ is unlocked, allowing for the following modifiers.

•   House Of Fun: All enemies drop explosive funballs on death, and enemies which dropped them in standard game mode now drop more. +20% Score Bonus.
•   Test Of Strength: Both Players and Monsters do triple damage critical hits with every attack. +20% Score Bonus.
•   O Fortuna: No SWAG parcels spawn, instead there is a RNG for monsters dropping SWAG on death. Chance: 5% monsters, 10% elites, 50% Bosses, and a 1% chance of dropping a Nerve Gas Bomb. +20% Score Bonus.
•   The Harder They Come: All enemies spawn as elites, even Bosses. +20% Score Bonus.
•   Targeted For Termination: Every 9 minutes of gameplay a specialist team of Anti-Catgirl Assassins will spawn, 6 members with 6 unique special attacks. +20% Score Bonus.
•   Endless Mode: The game continues after level 8, cycling back through the levels with ever increasing difficulty.  

With the exception of Endless Mode, which is it's own bonus scoring system due to the game never ending except via the Player's defeat, each selected gameplay challenge adds +20% to the Player's scoring. 

Saved Games Display Their NG+ Modes

And here is the whole thing in action on video:

 In other news ...

Flaming June was flaming hot

 Last year the weather was so bad I grew a single, tiny strawberry ... this year I have buckets of strawberries, more kale than I can fit in the freezer and one hell of a tan!

It has been proper scorchio, but the pursuit of free vitamin D hasn't prevented me from getting back into coding on my Melee Combat Demo.

I have spent the month, (inbetween updating Monsters Loot Swag, harvesting my bountiful veg patch, and absorbing vitamin D in non-capsule form), to working out the finer points of defense in the Melee Combat Demo. 

I have a combined a Dodge system into the Jump input, with a tap of the Jump button being a Dodge whilst holding the button down to apply a Jump. The dodge defaults to away from the camera view, as I expect the Player will be looking at an opponent most of the time, but the dodge can be made in a selected direction by the Player putting movement direction input in before the button tap is completed.

 Getting this working and networked for the player was not too much trouble, and I eventually got it working the AI aswell, as can be seen in the below video were I telegraph a heavy attack to the AI target. 

A bit more coding and a lot more maths, and the AI now checks which is the best way to dodge from an incoming attack in the obvious choice is blocked.

 During coding all of this I discovered that the hitBox collision resource I was using had the minor drawback that there was no boolean option for actually disabling checking for hitBoxes on hitBox enabled objects when I just wanted to test ONLY against their Bounding Box presence in the game world. 

As CastRay is used EVERYWHERE in the engine it seemed like a fool's errand to modify every single instance of that, so instead, after much methodical backtracing of how the function worked, I created another version that would always ignore hitBoxes, and so CastRayNoHB was born.

After all of this I have set about coding a  Parry system, which has been even more complicated. The real problems come from the fact that a Player, unlike the AI, might not actually be locked-on to the enemy they are about to hack at, and what happens if there are two Players, with neither locked on to each other, or someone is standing near the target and is also going to get hit in a wide, swinging, heavy attack - well maybe they would like to parry too.

So, I managed to code a system, based on AI skill modifiers, that checks proximity, parry ability, direction, weapon parrying attributes and a whole load of other stuff which I have forgotten off the top of my head. It doesn't actually use i-frames, but checks against a; "where is the incoming strike in relation to how far we are into the parry animation", and even a successful parry may be overwhelmed by a larger weapon, but does then limit damage. Too many times I have seen games were a Bollock Dagger blocks a Zweihänder with no ill effect. A fully successful parry staggers the opponent (technically it's knockback for the duration of the attack animation rather than full stagger) which allows for a light attack reposte that will hit for critical damage. No video of this happening yet, as I am still debugging the code and working out animations.

After Parry, the final defensive measure will be Shield Guard. Shields will not be used for parrying per-se, but will absorb damage dependant on Shield type which will deplete the defender's Stamina, whilst reducing any damage that does get through the same as parrying works. If the defender runs out of a Stamina their guard is broken and they will be staggered.

I suppose I could also throw in Roll-Slop, and give the Player the opportunity to decide if they want to use that instead of the dodge mechanic, but that would be decision for a later date.

Anyhow, happy strawberry munching everyone. 

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.

New Playable Character STARSHIP

 

New Playable Character STARSHIP brings the 1950s sci-fi vibe

Monsters Loot Swag got a new update on Steam, with the seventh playable character - and third unlockable - STARSHIP, who arrives with a cheesy 1950s sci-fi vibe. Duck Dodgers eat your heart out.

Starship is a high mobility and range-based character, and the only Monsters Loot Swag character who can truly run-and-gun without needing to slow down and aim to shoot.

And here she is in action.

And whilst we're talking about sci-fi cheese ... feel free to sing-a-long with ex-Pan's People cum Hot Gossip dancers, which I had on 45 speed vinyl ... which was a thing when I was a kid. I pity the younglings these days who will never know such joys as Gen-X took for granted.

 They don't make them like that anymore ...

Lord and Protector Gaben released a new Steamworks SDK build, which streamlined how player stats and achievements were obtained by the game app, with all player statistics now loading via the Steam Client before the game is even launched. Naturally thsi broke all my code which communicated with Valve's servers, so that had to be fixed ... especially for Airship Dragoon which meant hunting through C++ which I had written over 10 years ago ... whew lad.

10 years later and Airship Dragoon has achieved "Mostly Positive" reviews

And it wouldn't be a devblog without complaining about the weather! Err Nerr Snerr!

It didn't last long, just long enough for me to almost go arse-over-tit on an icy path, before a tropical storm came in and rained winter off again.

Monsters Loot Swag and Airship Dragoon are both on sale in the Steam Autumn Sale right now.

Next up, probably the final playable character for Monsters Loot Swag, after which I only have the last level to make and a few extra bits to tidy up before full release next year.

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.

Airship Dragoon Gets An Update

 

Airship Dragoon Update Sept 2023

 

 Airship Dragoon received a rare update this month. This was entirely due to me finally finding a way around using Visual Studio 2013, who's license Microsoft had locked me out of when they retired it a couple of years ago. The solution - the OFFICIAL MICROSOFT solution was  ... to hack the registry to forceably gain access to their own product ...

For more on that escapade, see the Airship Dragoon update on Steam.

Work on Monsters Loot Swag and bringing it up to the new and shiny version of the game engine continues unabated. One thing that the new engine has is a full script checker for compiling which actually looks through the scripts and reports errors - and boy did it find some. Whilst most errors were little more than referencing a wrongly named local variable and thus completely harmless, some were not, especially when trying to call function from the server for objects that did not exist at all.

And so began Monsters Loot Swag; Steam Early Access update 18; "The Big Bug Hunt".

This was quickly followed by the Monsters Loot Swag; Steam Early Access update 19; "The Big Bug Hunt Part 2" which continued to fix numerous minor issues and also got glyphs which are a fancy term for text and symbols, working for Playstation controllers and Steam Deck.

I rolled all the fixes from the new engine version into the previous version uploaded to Steam.

So back to upgrading the game to shiny PBR newness and new fangled asset system. Most of this is now done, with the actual loading/unloading having required some careful following of how the new system works to update, change and port my custom code. Single player campaign is now in and full functional with much fancy shininess to explosions due to the new HDR system. Online multiplayer is really the only thing left to finish off before I upload a full build of the new engine as a Beta Depot on Steam.

October is coming

 Next month is October and I hope to finally have a working beta of the new engine build up and running.

Damp Island is Damp

It seems to have been raining forever - at this rate there will be no water left for April to have showers ...

Monsters Loot Swag has had it's 13th Early Access Update! This fixed a whole load of minor issues and one major one - the awful openAL crossfade falloff has finally been slain ... with, naturally, a 2 line fix. 😫

Turns out it all that was needed was to feed openAL an ini file to tell it to stop dropping the fall off so early.

Also our leggy, harness encased, propeller powered catgirl has been testing an engine upgrade with glorious PBR! For which I made a Cornell Box in Blender 3D.

Reflections! Shiny, shiny reflections!

Now, updating the whole game to a new engine build which features not only shiny stuff like PBR, but an entire modular system is going to take some time. 

However, talking about new engine builds with funky modular features, I have been coding an animation based melee combat system in C++.

So far I have light and heavy attacks, activated by either tap or hold input. Both kinds of strike share a single Prepare Attack Animation, which works like a charge-up, and is based on weapon type. Light attacks are randomized, whilst heavy attacks are based on player input at the end of Prepare Attack Anim.

Each weapon has it's own attack speed and the player themselves have a "rage meter" which increases attack speed with the more blows they land on an opponent.

There are also primary and secondary types of damage, for instance a broadsword is primarily for slashing but can also stab. I plan on introducing different styles of armour (gambeson, lamellar, chain, plate, etc) which offer varied protection against the major types of attack damage of slash, blunt and stab.

Here's an animated gif showing a light thrusting attack - this was before I added weapon specific speed modifiers.

Light Attack - Yellow Circle Capturing Button Input

So that it was it for the wash out of a month which was March. I had was planning on setting up the Spring duvet for my bedding, but it's been so miserable and cold I think I will stick with the Winter duvet for another month. 😰

February Is For Pumpkins and Witches

 

 February, the month of the year long associated with witches and pumpkins!

Yeah, no, okay it isn't ... but my latest update for the top-down swag-em-up waifu shooter Monsters Loot Swag features the first of the unlockable player characters, Pumpkin! 

*Crosses off cute witch from his list of weibo anime meme characters*

Pumpkin can be unlocked by getting the "Marathon" achievement, and her attributes are as follows:

PUMPKIN is a mix ranged, playable character with a long ranged standard attack and decent strength for knocking monsters out of the way. Her special attack is a very high damage strike to the enemy to her immediate front, whilst her evasion stuns all monsters within half the screen with a slap of her broomstick. Whilst her healing and enery recharging is somewhat low, this is made up for with her exceptionally high starting mobility.

Vital Statistics ... 38-26-34 *rimshot*

And here she is in video action.

Speaking of videos ... here's a few more.

I have been looking at updating my working game engine code to the latest release of free and Open Source Torque 3D, the version with the fancy PBR and 21st Century asset system which apparently all modern game engines consider to be a must have. 

I had also spent some time making demo code for a third person camera system that has movement input orientated in screenSpace - eg: input "left" makes the player move left along the screen. Most third person games like Elden Ring, GTA and Sleeping Dogs (which is the only one of those I've actually played), have this input-to-movement system. For years randos in the forums had asked for this type of camera based movement, and I coded it up in an afternoon. This differs importantly from the top-down system in Monsters Loot Swag, as the camera is still the property of the player object, rather than being a seperate entity that orbits the player and is beyond their immediate control. This did mean quite a bit of hacking away at the player's move function but I managed to leave in the original system for first person view.

After this I added a lock-on system, so that the camera would orientate to view a target whilst keeping the player in-frame and allowing the same screenSpace based movement input system. To test the correct rotational direction of the camera I gave the rotation speed a delay which makes it look kind of janky.

Both the third-person camera and the lock-on resources are up on the Torque3D forums, but do be aware that the lock-on code was written in a haze of sleep deprivation and the maths can be described as "fugly", the networking is good though 😅.

Next up is another unlockable character for my Early Access title on Steam, Monsters Loot Swag, and I may also start to write up some demo code for a melee based hack-and-slash game, which might use actual weapon hitbox detection rather than faking the whole thing with maths and raycasts.

New Year, New Game Update

There's a joke in that loading screen somewhere ...

A new year, a new game update, a new level, and a new level Boss Monster to be defeated! It's Zorra, the Knife Enthusiast who guards the firey lava lakes of the Temple of Pele - that's the Hawaiian Goddess of volcanoes not the late footballer.

The update changelog can be viewed on Steam.

It's level 7 - so that is 70% of the game levels now complete, and it's the first level to introduce the environmental hazard of lava.

 As there was already a callback for entering liquid in C++ which passed the type it was fairly simple to set up a damage system when the player was immersed. However as there was no string variable for the player to record what type of liquid it was, the type would not get passed on the leave liquid callback. In the end I just used a trigger.

With another level complete, next up, will be some new cosplaying characters for the player to use. These will be the start of the unlockable characters, which is a Steam achievement in itself.

Halloween Horror Space Year 2022

Behold The True Horror This Halloween!

 More terrifying than any cosmic horror dredged from the neurosis of HP Lovecraft ... it's the global debt clock! 

Okay ... have you recovered from this ghastly Halloween fright? Then we shall continue with October's dev blog.

Finally I discovered the true source of a long running bug. I have spent months slowly chipping away at this bug, narrowing down the source and timing, even fixing the crash and suppressing the Out Of Bounds Array messages. Should have known that it would be an audio emitter issue.😫

 So it turned out that a lot of events happen when a player buy's Swag in Monsters Loot Swag, effects sparkle, audio plays, icons appear, objects spawn, marker objects hide and if there's a lot of other stuff happening at the same time ... and it's a game where there's always a lot of stuff happening at the same time ... the audio emitter can get out of synch when it wants to disable.

The solution was to stop everything from happening in the same engine tick with a simple schedule to make it all happen in order, giving the audio emitter a good half second to turn itself off and make sure it's ghost update of the network doesn't go tits up. Hurray, fixed and understood the cause. 😓

And speaking of audio bugs ... years ago I  noticed that sometimes the audio went ... iffy. It would start going off-key and warble intermittently. Not long before shipping the start of the Early Access game on Steam, I realized that this was caused by the camera being offset from the player location and thus camera and player could end up fighting for who got the audio source, with the sound cutting out if the camera was further away from the audio. At the time I threw in an emergency workaround by making the radius of all audio emitters large enough to swallow the camera.

Eventually I got around to coding a proper solution, use the camera rotation and the player object's location. This took a fair bit of maths as I could not remember which column of the matrix transforms I required to get to mix together ... until help on the Torque Game Engine Discord Server pointed out that there were already helper functions for matrixes and I could just use matrix.getPosition(); in cpp - boy did I feel dumb. 😅

The Takiyasha Ornamental Water Garden - early image

So, I have spent this month working on Level 6 for the next big update ... which I was hoping to have released this week but will probably take longer as I have redesigned the boss monster twice aleady. It's the Takiyasha Ornamental Water Garden and it builds on the environmental hazards which I introduced previously in Level 5. Behold water! Water is an environmental hazard as it slows down both the player and enemy monsters. I have designed the level so that if the player wants to get somewhere fast they're wanting to go through the water, but slow movement and enemy missiles are bad, so the player could decide to stay out of the water and go around it, thus preserving speed and the ability to dodge better.

I've also coded a lava type of liquid which only damages the player - more on that in Level 7.

Level 6 early testing gameplay

Level 6 is the home of the Stone Golems, high DPS, low HP, but very strong, range-based player characters have much lower strength than melee ones and so have a hard time barging them aside, and can easily get surrounded and trapped.

Once I finish up the level boss, Lady  Kaeru The Horticulturist, who is not going to fight you, and her giant champion who is going to fight you, I will be uploading the third big update to Steam, and the Early Access game of Monsters Loot Swag will be around 60% complete.

In the meantime, don't have nightmares! https://worlddebtclocks.com

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.

New And Improved Mouse Aiming

So it turned out nobody liked the original mouse aiming system

This was not entirely a surprise as literally nobody had previously said that they did like the mouse aiming system, but at least I got some feedback and examples of games which had good mouse aiming schemes. What people actually wanted was not the direct input control system to player character rotation, but for the player character to turn towards a visible mouse based cursor or aiming reticle.

And their wish was my command! Had a bit of trouble networking it in multiplayer co-op mode at first but got an example of setting up a net event that would send the client input directly to the server object rather than having to wait for standard client/server updates.

 It was also Steam Next Fest, were a thousand desperate indie devs got harvested for demo downloads so that gamers could get a badge and 55XP off Valve.

 I ran two livestreams with varying amounts of success and terrible audio until I ironed those problems out - even though I had ironed those problems out in testing previously. Was hoping for 10% wishlist but got 1%, which is at least better than Sweet FA%.

Monsters Loot Swag will ship as an Early Access title on Friday, July 28th, 2022 - which gives me four weeks to get it into a shippable state. eg: make more boss monsters for the compeleted levels.

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!

The Steam Upload And What Was I Thinking When I Wrote This Steam Stats System

 Monsters Loot Swag is on Steam and available for wishlisting here.

So, after a few months of testing off Steam, I have uploaded a build to a Steam depot ... and then immediately started to fix everything that didn't work ...

Who's Best Girl? You're Best Girl! If you don't get ganked ...

 Primary here was the minor issue that to finalize the build I had encoded the script files - and that my own script reading function only dealt with unencoded script files ... this could have been forseen but because it has been so long since I shipped a game to Steam *** 26th August 2014 *** I had forgotten about this sort of thing ... What I hadn't forgotten about was my system for storing Steam Stats.

This May Have Explained My Overly Convoluted System ...

Overly convoluted seems a little weak ... even reading through my own code comments it is best described as baffling. I clearly wanted a system which saved as much as possible on server calls but this was truly was absolute gibberish even if, most terrifyingly of all, it worked. All the same, it still had to be rewritten to make the whole thing readable again.

How Much!??!?!

Something else which I had overlooked was size - and in particular the minor issue that I had completely forgotten to trim my master files for things like artwork and audio. After some careful pruning the required HD space dropped to around a single gigabyte.

Steam Cloud save system is also fully up and running, and the Swag unlocks recorder fully functioning and integrated with User Interface so that the player can look through what Swags and Power-Ups that they have unlocked at a more leisurely pace, outside of the frenetic nature of the game.

As ever, there has been mountains more of work, but I can never seem to remember it all when it comes to the month blog write.

Monsters Loot Swag has been accepted for Steam NextFest, the forthcoming showcase of indie games on Steam, which runs from the 13th-20th of June, so look out the freely available demo coming at the end of May. So that's the next major job.