Dev Blog #43 - Upcoming Deadlines, Scrapped Weapon and more. (Patreon)

Good day everyone,

Phew, what a hard couple of weeks we have been getting ourselves into! We have 3 deadlines incoming and the amount of work forced me to delay the Developer Blog by a couple of days. We’ll discuss those later on.

Lets dive in!


Selaco Test Lab



If you are an Admiral Backer, you should have received an email inviting you to the Selaco Test Lab. A very small contained version of Selaco with a testing ground to test Gamepad support. This version also improves support on the Steam Deck.

If you have not received an email, please reach out to us. contact@alteredorbitstudios.com


Steam Deck

We are finally getting a Steam Deck! Well, one of us is. In order to make the Steam Deck version of Selaco the best it can be, we had to get our hands on a Steam Deck ourselves. At this time of writing, Cockatrice (our engine programmer) should be receiving his device today. Once the technical-side of things are properly finetuned and optimized, he will send the Steam Deck to me so I can get to work on the gameplay-side of things. Yes, this is low-budget game development at its finest!

I mentioned 3 deadlines earlier. Let's go through them all. And yes, I am absolutely taking a week off after all of the upcoming deadlines are completed.


Deadline 1: Selaco - Multithreading Test Version

Excitement! We finally have it working! Full asynchronous Texture and Sound loading in GZDoom. Internally, we’ve been doing all of our playtests using this new multi-threaded version and it works amazingly well. The game has never felt smoother and this is yet another huge step for the game’s performance. I can finally throw a grenade in the middle of a very busy scene and not get any stuttering when the explosion occurs.

This weekend, on November 26th, we are launching our very first Multithreading Test Version to a small group of testers. This will be the exact same Demo build that is currently on Steam, but will feature an updated engine that eliminates stutters.

If you want to join, please visit our Discord Page and click on the #Selaco-Testing channel! https://discord.gg/selacogame


Deadline 2: Selaco - Patreon v0.40 Demo Test

This is a big one! A few days ago we posted this tweet on our Twitter Page. Not only was this our first attempt at making something that vaguely resembles a trailer (no, seriously! All video’s we’ve shown publicly have been raw and unedited footage because none of us are good video editors and we also want the game to be as honest as possible).

The footage itself, I think, came out okay but there were some severe audio issues. Apparently it was a bit loud. Like, really loud. It slipped it's way because I completely forgot to take audio levels into consideration and I did not find out about it until I stumbled upon a Selaco thread in PC /r/pcgaming (We actually hit the front page of that subreddit!)



Whooooops...


Deadline 3 - v0.40 Demo launch

This is where we launch the version to the public. As usual, this is extremely frightening but oh-so exciting. We love this new version, we feel like it improved almost everything there is to improve. Of course, this is still far from the final version, but the amount of polish is becoming increasingly high and this is a major step up we feel.

We discussed a number of these changes two blog posts ago. Feel free to read them if you want!

Enough deadlines. Let's discuss some in-dev stuff


Coyote Jump



This is something I always knew existed, but was never familiar with the term and I think it’s quite interesting to share. The Coyote Timer is commonly used in video games and is a crucial system to have.

We are all familiar with the ‘’Wile-e Coyote moment’’, right? Where Wil-e runs over the edge of a cliff, but not actually dropping down until he realizes this and shares a moment with the audience.

Did you know that most video games use something similar? Probably even your favorite shooter! It’s a technique used to make jumping feel more responsive.

By default, GZDoom denies the player the ability to jump the moment their feet are off the ground. This is, of course, very realistic, but this means that platforming sections can get rather unresponsive and frustrating. There will be plenty of occasions where you hit the Jump button, but realizing too late that your character is already over the edge of the platform, so you end up hitting the floor instead of the desired destination. Platformers don't have this problem nearly as much, because you are always able to see your character. In a First Person Shooter however, this becomes challenging since you cannot see your characters feet when looking in front of you. You dont want to look below you while platforming, you want to look at the thing you are jumping to!



source: HowToConstructDemos.com

This is where the Coyote Timer comes in. The moment you fall off a ledge, the game is granting you one quick chance to react and still perform a jump, despite your feet no longer hitting the floor. This is a very brief window of time, but significant enough to make all the difference during a platforming section.

This has now been added to Selaco and it feels great. The demo does not have a lot of platforming, but the Storage Room towards the end would make for a solid testing ground for this mechanic.


Scrapped Weapon Model

Hey remember when we showed a scrapped Railgun design a few blog posts ago? Seasoned backers have probably seen it already, it was this model:



What if I told you, there’s another scrapped model? Low and behold, the other Railgun!



(Scrapped railgun, attempt #2)

Just like the Railgun before it, I do not dislike the design, but I do feel like it’s rather generic. Unfortunately, this is one of those moments where I completely botched my role as an art director (I’m learning as I go!) by doing a bad job at providing instructions to an insanely talented artist. I don't usually enter a phase where I feel creatively bankrupt, but around the time we got to work on the Railgun, I was juggling around multiple different Selaco-related projects and was not around enough to provide clear guidance to our artist. When I was around, my head just wasn’t there, so my instructions were not optimal.

The result is a good looking Railgun with a design we’ve seen time and time again in other videogames. For a weapon this important, we wanted something incredible.

We scrapped the whole thing and I had a very good late-night chat with SIlvia (our Concept Artists) to discuss the direction we should go. After a bunch of sketches and iterations, we managed to get a weapon design that is easily our favorite weapon in our entire roster right now. The concept art is done, we’ve done test runs with a Test Model and are fully convinced that this is the design. It will unfortunately remain behind closed doors until the game launches, but trust me that it’s amazing and I cannot wait for you to get this weapon in the game.


Voxel Models

Feast your eyes on some new voxel models. As usual, made by Borion! We needed some lab equipment for a later level so got to work on a whole bunch at once.





Yes, they can be destroyed, obviously!




New Enemy Faction

Another thing that has to stay behind closed doors (for now?) is the addition of 3 new enemy types that are separate from the usual Soldier grunts. These will show up in the 4th level of the game.

Their model is ready, so once the demo update is out there, I start implementing them into the game and start working on the animations.

The animation part of these new enemies are going to be very challenging for me. I’m used to animating regular humanoids (the Crawler Mines were easy because it’s a robotic ‘spider’ with only 4 legs), but these are completely different. Very excited to expand my animation skills into something less traditional. Thankfully for me, sprites are a lot easier to animate because rather than having to make a very fluid bit of motion at a high frame rate, I have only a handful of frames to worry about!


Death Animations

We’ve added a handful of new death animations to all of our enemies. Even the big juggernaut finally dies properly without awkwardly looking at the player while exploding into pieces. Hooray!

Here is one of the new Death Animations for the Engineer. Quite a complex one, because it has multiple stages and we had to factor in that some players would stop shooting halfway in the sequence, so it took quite a fair amount of spritework. Worth it though, because, oh boy, is it satisfying. So satisfying even, that I’m sharing two gifs!





[Please ignore how the sprite turns invisible for one frame. It’s an issue with Multi-threading we are currently working on fixing!]


Conclusion

One minor issue we are currently dealing with, is that one of our artists is having some difficulty locating a new home. I think I mentioned in an earlier blog post that one of our artists is moving, but unfortunately a rather last-minute cancellation took place, forcing them to find a new place to temporarily live. The whole process has been a nightmare, so the work output in terms of art has been a little slower than usual. Thankfully, they are still able to work. Hopefully I’ll have some better news on that end in the next blog post.

Everything else has been going very well in regards to Selaco. Progress is rapid and we are on track to hit all of the 3 upcoming deadlines.

Remember to keep an eye out on your email, since we’re sending you an email soon with a private beta password for the Selaco Demo.

See you there, Patron. And thank you for your support <3

Wesley