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 ... 😜