Just your friendly neightbourhood dev here. I'm coming back from watching the new Spider-Man : Homecoming so I'm supercharged with hype to get more work done on PowersVR.
First, I'd like to welcome any new players. The steam summer sale got even more people to join in on the journey to a full release. The game is now owned by more than 1000 players! A big deal for me personally, as it's my first proper game. While there won't be a new update for another week, I wanted to update you all on what I've been up to.
As the ones who follow the announcements know, now that the second content patch is live, and some of the bigger issues are patched up, I'll be focusing on PowersVR's story campaign, the release of which will mean the end of the game's Early Access status.
One of the biggest issues with the current sandbox is the enemy AI behavior. For the story I wanted players to be challenged, because playing a cakewalk of a game is just watching a movie, while having to wiggle your hands around occasionally. The original robot AI in the sandbox was the result of my first attempt at writing Artificial Intelligence of any kind. Now that I've had time to learn more and started using some more common practices, I've been able to significantly improve the way robots acts in the sandbox. They'll now detect the player much sooner and more easily, respond to being damage from afar and chase you for a while if you try to get out of the fight. These practices and code can easily be translated to enemies and others in the story.
That's the cool thing about this approach of development in my opinion. Systems and assets done for the story campaign directly improve the sandbox and challenges without much extra effort on my part.
On the graphics side of things I've been experimenting with procedural city block generation (for backgrounds) and made modifications to my master material (a smart texture) to allow easily changing the color tint of all assets in the game, without affecting certain areas. For instance the building below's concrete is tinted, but the windows remain unaffected.
I've also converted even more assets to use my master material, improving the overall performance on the graphics side. At some point I'll look into other fps bottlenecks such as physics and collision.
Lastly, I've written a detailed list of assets that will feature in the story mode, but are also very useable in the sandbox. Most of them are 1:1 redrawings of current assets that I've purchased. While those low-poly models look good, they don't quite fit the game or match the comicbook style I have in mind. So a big task is to slowly drain out all outside art until everything is in a uniform graphical style.
I've been looking into Google's new app - Blocks. It promises a streamlined 3D model workflow in VR. While the tool is basic, I've been trying to gain some proficiency with it in anticipation of more features.
That's it for today's update. Expect a lot of what I've talked about here to be in your hands next week!