Greeting and welcome to newsletter # 6!
The latest video dev log has been released on YouTube and can be found here:
Last Week:
Was able to finish the death animations for the enemy units. It involved passing damage points to a custom Niagara particle effect that would sweep particles over the enemy then set the enemy mesh to invisible before activating particle physics to achieve a disassembled pixel look. I ran into issues with the debug window reporting what looked to be correct info but turned out to be written after the module script was using them so my distance calculations were coming up zero
I also took some time to try and make a test build of the game. I do this once a month to ensure everything in build is working as expected. Eventually I’ll be making Beta builds for you guys to test but for now I’m just running some simple tests to prevent errors from creeping in that would be hard to fix if I waited too long
It turned out I had an issue with a hard coded path that wasn’t too hard to resolve but once I had the build working it was giving me errors on my low spec laptop about VRam being low. After doing some research I found my laptop is a little too low spec for testing. The game uses about 3GB of VRam now and it will likely go up some after I include all the effects and level assets so I’m going to aim for 4GB of VRam minimum. I came to this number after consulting the steam hardware survey
It turns out that around 85% of people have 4GB or better and 64% have 8GB or better so that should cover most people but I might have to bump it to 8GB.
I wasn’t able to get to:
- Cleaning up the arm IK so it disables when vaulting or climbing
- Add dagger weapon and damage
- Start on mini map for HUD
I’m about a week behind at this point for my store release deadline but I’m hoping to catch up some this week since I worked out a lot of my animation issues already and most of what I’m behind on involves the animation systems
This Week:
- Damage pixel bubbles when enemy hit
- Cleanup movement when you have pistol equipped
- [From last week] Cleaning up the arm IK so it disables when vaulting or climbing
- [From last week] Add dagger weapon and damage
- [Time permitting] Start on mini map for HUD
That is all for this update,
Stay tuned for more!
Tony D
Cronoforge Studios Inc