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.

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!