New Stream Layouts
After months of work, the new stream layout is finally finished. Instead of going with two distinct themes for the gaming and game dev side of things, I decided to create one environment. I figured that this would save me time in the long run. As it turns out, it took a bloody long time anyway. But let’s take a look at the new scenes.
So the gaming scenes focus mostly on the TVs and work as a sort of faux streamer setup. Remember that I use a 3D avatar on screen, so I can just place it over the scene. I’ve added a variety of new shaders into the layouts. Including drop shadows, CRT filters, and my personal favourite, an adaptive lighting shader.
As you can see, as I’m playing the game, the lighting on the little window where my avatar is changes. I think it adds a bit more immersion.
As for the game dev scene, well, it’s actually not that much different from the last layout.
There are new backgrounds for the AFK and chatting scenes, but the idea remains the same.
However, I am now using Advanced Scene Switcher for two things: To better switch out windows when changing applications to require less manual adding of windows to the old scene switcher and also to swap out the backgrounds based on the time of day. Yes, that’s right. The backgrounds change every hour. It’s a very sudden transition, but at least it works.
Now, I will be making adjustments, of course, but I’m fairly pleased with how it turned out. Especially considering that I am not great at modelling things in Blender. Which I’m looking to improve on in the relatively near future.
Now I just need to make a new avatar. That will take even more time.
Updates On Tur
I’m not working on a video update for Tur, but I’ll fill you in on the most recent progress.
I’ve been continuing the process of optimising, refactoring, and generally improving the code. Breaking things up into reusable scripts, especially to minimise having to change multiple things all at the same time. Things like the skill system and battle system have had major overhauls; more on that in a bit.
I have removed the status icons from the map screen and redid the UI for the stamina, hunger, and tiredness bars. Players can still access the status menu via the Select button menu. I did this for one reason, to make larger, more detailed maps. Surprisingly, although the game is stuck inside of a loop, the camera still follows the player. So large maps are back on the table. Although to get this to work, I had to use a well-documented trick involving setting the parallax scrolling for the UI part at the top of the screen to zero, fixing it in place while the rest of the map moves.
But with larger maps comes a new problem: more detailed tilesets are now required. I’m still working on it, but I have made some additions just to make it a little less repetitive in the visuals.
Getting back to the battle system, I’ve made a number of changes to it. In regard to skills, the MP usage is now dynamically adjusted based on the strength difference of the player and enemy. So weaker enemies require less MP to damage, and vice versa for stronger enemies. I did this to both make easier battles less of a resource hog and to make harder battles make you reconsider using skills.
But on top of this, player classes are now weak and strong to particular enemy types. I’ve broken it down to three categories: slash, magic, and pierce. Here’s a breakdown of how it affects each class:
Now you may notice that each class also has an attack type. As you might have noticed, the default attack in the game dealt the same amount of damage to everyone. This has been changed also. So now certain enemies will be strong or weak to the default attacks of specific classes. Except the mage, where only the spells matter.
This has had the side effect of completely scrambling the previous difficulty curve. It’s far more random now, and the player is likely to suffer random instant death. Which is both a good and bad thing. It makes the game harder, but it could be considered unfair. Unfortunately, it’s also quite difficult to balance around. I’ll likely make changes once I get more feedback after the next demo comes out.
Lastly, there’s been a variety of adjustments to make the game more challenging and prevent cheesing. Notably, camps now check to see if you’ve actually been engaging in combat. If you skip battles now, you won’t gain any benefits from resting. Although, I have yet to fix the problem of the dialogue box reappearing when re-entering the map screen. I’ll get around to it eventually.
Cybersurfer Progress
Progress on Cybersurfer has been minimal, unfortunately. Although I have managed to create some things.
First off, missiles. Lots of missiles.
Simple thing, just a model that aims towards a target and then blows up. However, getting those targets placed properly on the track did lead to a minor headache, as I forgot the correct way to transform the points from local spline to world space. And to top it off, it’s my first experiment with object pooling, a technique that should hopefully save some memory and processing power when I need to display a large number of objects at once.
I’ve started enhancing the game’s graphics with some custom shaders. Currently it’s just missiles and boost pads that use them, along with the track that I already did some time ago. I’m affecting both the textures and the vertices. The missile spins using the shader, and the boost pad has constantly moving verts. There’s more to come as I create more assets.
I’m starting to add sound into the game. The hoverboard now has a low hum that gets distorted as you move around; there’s a sound when grinding, and the missiles have a whistling sound followed by an explosion when they hit the target. All the audio mixers have been set up, so getting new sounds added shouldn’t be too hard. It’s really just finding the right sounds that’s the issue.
I’ve been fiddling with post-processing in order to improve reflections in the game, but with no luck. I also tried moving from the default renderer to URP, but this didn’t help at all. I guess what I’m trying to do with reflections perhaps requires a more custom solution or upgrading my Unity version. Post-processing does offer screen-space reflections, but it’s very visually noisy, and the range on it is limited. A camera-based solution would likely be better, but I’m not quite sure how to go about doing it.
Currently, I’m relearning aspects of Blender so that I can properly use LODs for objects and to recreate the character model, as that one I have is very misproportioned, meaning that the animations look a bit off. Furthermore, other issues have arisen with animations causing verts to go haywire. Seeing as the model wasn’t mine to begin, I should just make my own and do it properly.
But I need to properly learn how Blender works and improve my workflow before doing so. Which is my current objective.
Heatwaves and Football
In other news, it’s been really hot. This has caused my stream schedule to go a bit awry, as it is very difficult to stream when it is nearly 30°C in here. Having my window open invites both bugs and noise pollution, so I opted to wait until the heatwave had died down a bit, which it now has.
During all this, the World Cup was occurring. England lost against Argentina, of course, but beat France in the 3rd place match, which was fun to watch. Although I only caught the second half. This time around, I decided to not watch the matches as they were airing because, quite frankly, sitting through those games has become agonising. So I choose to watch the highlights on YouTube instead and spend my time doing other things. But I still got to appreciate the good parts. Bellingham did a very good job in a lot of those games.
Finally, my friend has informed me that Iceland sells Vanilla Coke. The proper, full fat, UK version. Every other store seems to only stock the Coke Zero version. Needless to say, I purchased some. Although my friend also brought a bunch over at my request from a wholesaler that Iceland runs. Which means that I now own 40 cans of it. Or did; I’ve drunk a few since.
I don’t know if they’ve always had them or if it’s just a limited run for the summer. Hopefully it’s the former, but who knows. Knowing how much the government loves banning and taxing things, I suspect it won’t last. Which is why I was buying it from import shops the last few years.
I’ve noticed that my updates for this blog seem to be rare these days. Maybe around 3-5 posts in a year. That’s not really good enough. Perhaps I should make posts about the gaming videos I put up. Although I don’t think that would be a good use of bandwidth. I’ll try to post more, but you know I probably won’t.
-Adam