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.

Boxes In Boxes

 

According to the weather forecast, she will need a jumper ...

After getting mild sun burn sat out by the veg patch with a bottle of wine, we are now back to standard British weather of needing a jumper for late Spring and early Summer ... Flaming June looks like it means that the fireplace will need to be lit ...

Steam brought out an update to the Steamworks SDK, sneaking it out again as they did in the previous month without any fanfair. Once again they had made changes to the authentication system, and once again I had to wade through code comments to find out what it all meant - except this time I also had to wade through the online documentation, complete with it's links to various 404 dead pages. To quote the docs at https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/webapi/ISteamUserAuth:

 NOTE: This call requires a publisher API key to use this method. As such this API MUST be called from a secure server, and can never be used directly by clients!

So, yeah I'm good, this was just splitting up web-based games from the standard Steam Client authentication. Also feel free to click the api.steamworks link at the bottom of that page for more helpful advice. 😉

In April I had attempted to create a melee combat system of checking through a defending player object's hitBoxes for intersection with an attacking object's hitBox - to see if this would be faster than using a raycast system of quad edges projected from the attacker's weapon - all whilst suffering from the Dreaded Lurgy.

What I found, during illness enduced brain fog, was that there was no current system to determine whether rotated worldSpace boxes intersected (OOB) only AABB. Now without the brain fog I had another attempt at coding a solution to this, with a nice easy early out if half longest box sides added together were beyond central distance, though ended up using raycasts after all for the actual connection checks, which were oriented in worldSpace with the attacker's box and then a perpendicular test if no initial result was found.

The end result was that I found checking through the defender's 12 hitBoxes (but potentially up to 20) could easily take more than the standard 4 raycasts which I had been previously using. On top of that, box intersection would take more the boxes behind the initial hit into account, nearly doubling the struck areas, so a big melee swing would 98 damage rather than 40 something. To order these results in worldSpace would require another raycast or more maths based on location and orientation.

tl;dr - I've kept my original melee system, it works fine for what I want, but I might use the OOB intersection for weapon on weapon parrying.

So, that was the month that was. Flaming June awaits, with a promise of thick jumpers and hot cocoa ... 😒

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.

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 ...

That Was The Year That Was 2021

 

Look out behind you!

It got windy and I had to climb on the roof to fix some broken tiles by sticking them together with No Nails glue.

In other news, I have mostly been integrating Steamworks with Torque, in all those hard to reach places I haven't used before like Stats and Leaderboards and getting multiplayer achievements to fire.

To be continued ... as I forgot to do this earlier and there's only 12 minutes of the year left ...

Steam Capsule Box Art

 Before we start, we should address the fact that I have communicated with the STATE APPARATUS and the APPARATCHIKS of whom have actually communicated back within the space of 60 DAYS ... which must be some sort of new world record in getting any response out of a CIVIL SERVANT - who incidentally -  are still all off work, riding their tax payer bought Pelatons at home whilst the STATE APPARATUS demands everyone else goes back to the office.

We desperately need that extra 150 quid off you to squander on some bollocks

Okidoki, vidya gaemz.

Steam has started releasing information about the Steam Deck, videos and guides are available here. Looks like competition for handhelds (eg: Switch and only Switch 'cos nobody else wants to do hardware anymore), but then do we all remember how exciting Steamboxes sounded? Maybe the handheld market is less crowded (eg: Switch and only Switch 'cos nobody else wants to do hardware anymore).

Anyhoo, the upshot of all this is that I no longer feel compelled in SPACE YEAR 2022 to bother about any display size under 720p vertical.

So I have been testing out some Steamworks features on the new game, which I have not actually uploaded yet to steamworks, but am just doing it locally with Steam loaded. This gives the rather odd result of a blank page with my game title showing online and recording my progress in-game.

Fixed a bug where I accidentally dropped napalm on the player and not the enemies ...

 Having decided that this all looks a little awkward online as only I can see my own game's presence anyhow, I decided it might be an idea if other people - eg: potential customers - could also see my game's presence, and thus we set about designing some box art for the Steam store page.

Soon(ish)™

This required me to remove the towel that is semi-permenantly draped over the display tablet that lies on the desk (it's an upturned A0 drawing board wedged against a window sill to take the weight of all the screens on it) and recharge the pen to get some reponse out of it.

Being a classically trained figurative oil painter (not that I've done any of that in 10 or 15 years ...) I do still find the methodology of digital painting to be a bit ... odd. Is it better to greyscale the form of the painting and then add another layer for blocking colour with some sort of transparency, or should I add colour with tone and shading for each stroke - which seems a right faff. Also I am not terribly enamored with the digitally replicated paint brushes as it's not really how physical medium works - at least not oil painting, especially when the brush leaves layered marks but I need to move the screen/canvas over to another part of the image without breaking the flow ...

Anyhow I have decided on a composition that looks like it can work by cropping with all of the sizes that Steam Capsule images require, and I havr blocked in some very rough tonal marks to find form and some basic colours. This in itself has made me wonder whether it would be better keeping the colouration simple as in a 3 layer comicbook style or more a more complicated and painterly style. Of course I might just do both and see.

Need to change that hair colour ...

In other news the UK had a storm which was actually a real storm rather than the usual crying wolf about some seasonal gales. Whilst a fence panel went down, the broken tiles which I had glued together with NoNails survived. One of the few weekends that hiking had to be called off due to safeguarding the house and general threat of death.

I am 50% prepared for Xmas which means I have alcohol, toilet paper and a sawn-off shotgun to protect it all. Still waiting for variant Ligma ... 😜