June 17, 2024
Malevolent Planet 2DMondayNewsstatus reportUPDATES

Need Vacation from Vacation

Heeeeello! It's been 2 weeks since my latest status update, but since I don't have any more planned departures until end January... next year, that means outside of maybe the winter holidays there shouldn't be big delays like this anymore.

I was even starting to miss working during the time I was away, June is very hot and the days are too long, even at 8-9am it's pretty warm so the noon/afternoon were out of the question for long walks.

Now about Malevolent Planet, I did a ton of work before it was time to leave so I'll list all the bulletpoints I had taken care of:

Old Tasks:

  • Updating the Unity version I'm using to the latest LTS. ✅

  • Reimporting Unity's lighting system (Unity URP) to the game. ✅ All the sprites in all the scenes have been updated to use the URP materials, let's hope URP is better nowadays than when I tried it with the 2020 unity version.

  • Reimporting the textures in the game to use point filtering instead of bilinear. ✅

  • Finish drawing the new animation for scene, it's pretty complex and it'll feature the first x-ray content. ✅

  • Fix android rendering issue that's not reproducible on any other platforms, it's probably the graphics api. ✅ Fixed by updating the graphics API to Vulkan, unity was using a version of opengl that was deprecated. If you encounter any issues on your phone with the upcoming android builds feel free to ping me, if vulkan isn't stable enough we can use OpenGL 3.0 (previously was OpenGL 2.0)

  • Finish building all the village art assets, including the buildings that took a while to get to a satisfying level because there's a lot of effort put into making nice levels especially from now on. ✅

  • Use Sprite Atlases everywhere in the game. ✅

  • Improve the gameplay UI, a poll related to that is coming ✅ (the sketch was built, but the game isn't yet updated to use the new UI)

So luckily most of the tasks I had set out to do are not going to bother us anymore, but we still have the following for a June release:

New Tasks:

  • Update the gameplay UI to look like the one from the poll, since the overwhelming majority voted for the updated UI rather than the old UI.

  • Animate the xray alien scene.

  • Write the plot that provides context for the xray alien scene. I think this would maybe be either on the journey to the village, or the first task that would be provided in the village.

  • Make it possible to save/load local storage saves on Android. This makes it so that even if you uninstall the game and install it later you can load saves made in the past since otherwise the data would be wiped, you will also be able to load saves made on PC on your android device and vice versa, loading saves made on Android on your PC.

I only have one problem that's slowing down development right now, that is, I need some kind of system that can spawn NPCs using presets that would also allow me to sometimes override skin color/hair color and select alien races. Currently it takes me about 20-30m to add a new NPC to the game and it's pretty inefficient, considering we'll also have many npcs coming along.

Because of this I might need to make the xray scene part of the journey to the village, so in the end you can enter the village but there will not be any NPCs around, however when you'll load the save made in the village in the July build you'd see the NPCs around with their own routines/tasks/quests (it's all part of the plot, the village is an area you have to complete to advance the story so it's not an open world level, but a Mass Effect-like level that feels big/alive hopefully)

I'll return on Friday with my updates to the above tasks, have a nice week until then!