We’re well into the phase where the game starts to feel pretty cohesive. Here’s our new “forest hallway” environment that I haven’t yet added to the Steam screenshots:
Some of the tasks that went into making our new environments included:
- A fully featured lighting and shadow system
- New shaders for all vegetation and environment objects
- Completing the climbing system
- A bunch of new vegetation models made in Speedtree
The challenge is getting these environments to work well on lower-end computers.
I’m testing on my old Nvidia 1060 laptop and they’re stable at >30 FPS; I wonder if anyone with a lower end rig will be wanting to play? Luckily there is still some low-hanging fruit left for optimization.
The quest system
The other major feature we’re working on polishing right now is a quest system. After some back and forth about how to code the quests, we settled on a pretty powerful system using a visual scripting system, via a 3rd party package.
We've successfully put together a quest that involves grabbing a hat for the Queen Ant. Maybe you'll get to wear the hat afterward...?
Finally, a grab bag of other things we’ve been working on:
- Set up permanently flying creatures (like bees)
- Implemented a wrapper scene and sub-scene switcher that should both ease our workflow and make the game more stable
- Investigated and fixed various weird results from unexpected part combos
- Added a “treasure chest” feature tied to completing enemy encounters
Is a demo ever coming? Well, the game is nearly ready for it! … but, we kept putting off final polish on the movement system. Early playtesting surfaced a few bugs in that area, so we’re spending time stomping those out before doing a fully public demo.
I think we’ll be ready in a couple months (probably after Steam Next Fest, because releasing a demo in that time frame without being in the Fest is a bad idea). That said, if you want in on pre-public playtesting, DM me or join the Discord.
That’s all for today, thank you for reading and following Strange Seed!