Hi everyone!
Here I am with another dev log thingamajig!
Unfortunately, the new job has gotten in the way of development a little. I haven't had much energy left to code after work, but I'm sure it will get better once I get into the swing of things. \[]~(￣▽￣)~
So please bear with the slower updates for now.
Backend and Testing
Warning: some technical yapping ahead for those interested.
With that being said, I've mainly been working on the backend side of things. I've realized that I can't reliably maintain working code without being able to automatically test its logic.
Without going into too much detail, I spent the month building a framework that will allow me to test various systems without having to repeatedly test everything manually.
This should allow me to add, modify and generally mess around with things without constantly worrying that something else will break. Your experience should also improve, since you hopefully won't have to deal with me breaking features that previously worked. And if I do anyway, I'll be able to cover that case with tests so it doesn't happen again!
In the meantime, I also expanded the system I use to drive character and weapon stats, allowing for faster and more flexible development. This is mainly intended for the new upgrade system, but pretty much the entire game needs to be migrated to the updated system, which also takes a significant amount of time.
Early Look at Character Cores
To take a bit of a break from code, I also went ahead and implemented the UI side of Character Cores, a feature planned for a 3.x release. I can't reveal too much about it yet, but it is intended to be an additional, more grind-focused, per-character progression system.
These can only be acquired through Recollection.
This also required some additional space on the character selection screen, so I've compacted the various panels together.
Of course, this is still subject to change.
Ambient Occlusion
In the last dev log, I showcased the new ray-traced global illumination method. This time, I would like to present some further improvements!
It's somewhat difficult to show off with a single screenshot, so here are two.
Before:
After:
There will be three settings available. One of them is fully ray traced, but it will require the game to be running with DX12 enabled and an RTX-capable graphics card.
On a side note, I do find it funny how much I focus on visual improvements, even though you tend not to notice a whole lot of them during actual gameplay... But hopefully this is setting things up for the future. Wink, wink.
Thank You for Sticking Around
That's it for this month. Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot to showcase, but as I mentioned, I've mostly been occupied with the code side of things, which took priority over the planned rework.
I'm grateful to each and every one of you who has shown interest in and support for my little project. (●'◡'●)
As always, I'm open to any feedback, suggestions and whatnot!
P.S.
For those interested, the character themes are now also available to listen to on YouTube!