Goodbye Summer Hello Fall 🍂 Here’s what we’ve been up to over the past couple of months!
Levelling up the Turn-Based Battles
Our big focus for the past couple of months was to integrate the new SFX and do an audit of all the sprites and animations we’ve added for this battle system in the past year or so, and fix any issues. It was a huge undertaking – we reviewed thousands of sprites and made hundreds of adjustments – but it’s done! We did find a few “bugs” here and there – such as missing shadows, palette swaps, etc. – so there will have to be some adjustments that have to be done in the future, but most of this is solid now and won’t need to be changed again.
But now that all that work is done let’s show off some of the new enemies, skills and their corresponding animations and SFX!
Kickstarter Rewards
The in-game Kickstarter rewards are now wrapped up! We’ll keep the location of each backer’s house or NPC a secret for now, but let’s show off some of the custom houses we designed!
This backer let us do whatever we wanted – they have 8 cats and a small messy office where they tinker on things, so that’s what we ended up making!
This backer wanted a house that looks like it’s used as some kind of laboratory. It’s a mess. It’s disorganized. Books all over the place, tables full of equipment. The person who lives there is clearly not interested in maintenance, but rather science and/or technology!
This backer wanted a tinkerer’s house, with green being the dominant colour, and any accent should be bronze. The house should be a mess of broken and half finished projects.
This backer wanted a small but tidy space with the atmosphere of a pretentious snob. Something like BBC Sherlock’s flat but not a mess of stuff everywhere.
This backer wanted a small one-floor house with three rooms, two of which are locked. In the living room, there is one couch, and two armchairs. Their custom NPC would be sitting in one of the armchairs snoring with a book on his stomach.
Cave Shader Performance
We’ve recently been updating the shaders and adding performance toggles, and one of the last shaders we needed to tackle was the Cave Shader.
The struggle with this shader was that it was pretty well optimized to begin with, but we needed to move things around and split things up so that we could have the dynamic portion and a static portion for the toggle. We’ve also shifted some code around between the CPU and GPU to get some more FPS.
At the end of the day, there’s not too much difference between the two modes so we may need to revisit this in the future if there are any reports of lag or stuttering.
What’s Next?
Now that we’ve wrapped up the Turn-Based Battles (for now) we’ll be refocusing to look at the Debate Battles! Since we need to hunker down and focus on writing there won’t be too much we can show off visually for the next little bit. We’ll also be working on some small visual upgrades and additions to the maps in the meanwhile. Specifically the next couple of months will be:
Adding Passive Animals to Olvia & Vescha provinces
Rebalancing Debate Battles
Rebalancing Debate Facts/Evidence/etc.
Have a good fall and we’ll see you in November!