August 2021 Update! (Patreon)

Hey hey people!

Time for another update, last month was kinda crazy with me going to do lots of irl chores and other stuff, I worked on some nice needed stuff and planning for future proofing, and polishing stuff that I had done so long ago.

Let's talk about the meat this month. It's hard to show but i hope you people see how is to start planning ahead for features that will ease the development in the future.

Im implementing a system that allows for all the text ingame (that aren't images) to be easily translated through external files. Still not complete but all the code needed internally is almost done.

This avobe is what the code of dialogs was looking before, It shows that it's a bad idea because basically the text is hardcoded into the "NPC" or "Cutscene" active at that moment. That makes it very hard if not impossible to translate the game.

Now it looks like this.

Much easier, the actual conversation NPC or Cutscene will not have text, all will be created and stored in a controller, where it will be easily managed and edited, having references to the actual object that will display the conversation.

Now, the next step is to finish the code that checks for external files containing the actual dialog (and make a safeguard if the file doesnt exists or the text isnt in the file).

Now, what ive been doing this month too? maybe what it takes me more time to do, art :c.

Its fun to draw, tiles and sprites, but man, backgrounds are so time consuming, and ive been wanting to redo the forest bg after a long time doing the old one, because ingame it didn't feel good for me. so finally i have the new background!

Im still tweaking the colors and the fog a little bit, but i like the overall looks that it has now. Trees are still big but way thinner and they dont look like too massive like the old one.

Here it is for comparison.

I've also did the swimming mechanics in the game, There was 3 types i was undecided on, all with advantages and disadvantages, so i made a poll and I hope you participated!

The winner was the "reverse mario" or buoyancy style wich makes Rynn float to the surface/ceiling if you dont push any buttons.

You can see the debug controls int the screen on how Rynn moves in the water (tbh is pretty different from on dry ground).

The underwater stuff made me realize how inefficient the water effect shader was, to give some perspective, the game runs at 50fps, yeah I know its a weird number, but it was what I felt better for the gameplay style, maybe bc I grew up playing lots of consoles ina PAL region where Sonic the Hedgehog and other games ran at 50 instead of 60, anyways letme continue. 

Normally the game on my "highish end" computer, runs at 300-500 real fps on very crouded levels, well, its fine for me when it really drops, but puting the game on my laptop then suddenly that is like 150-200fps, thats also fine bc it doesn't drop below 50.

Well, when i was testing the water level the real fps on my big computer dropped to 70fps, and here lies the big problem. looks like this shader depends on a lot of computer power so i have to find a way to limit that so it doesn't go below 50 ever. Finally (bc im not good at shaders and I'm scared of them too) I decided to compartimentalize the shader object into sections and then make them despawn when out of view from the player, and then respawn when they are near being shown on screen.

Here a good example with that distance reduced so you can see it on the screen.

Of course I also finished the character portrait and sprite for Febria, a Patron character, that will probably be wandering the Somberwood gardens.

And thats it for this month, though I feel I'm forgetting something more I worked on, with the code... its hard to track that without images, gifs and videos I do when completing. Probably was just tweaking the code, rewriting stuff that was causing crashes (oh i remember, somehow the Comander Yasha fight was bugged and had at least 3 hard crashes now, like I haven't touched that code and it worked all fine why that happens?).

Well, c ya! and until the next update!