posted in Projects Of Some Degree Of Interest

Hello there! Welcome to this installment of your favourite Weekly Update blog!

I'm gonna say this outright: there are two new mechanics and some freshen aesthetics too!

So let's get right to it!

Alt Fires

First up, let's talk about that lonely right mouse button. Previously that button was used to trow crystals around, but due to the previous update, there's no more crystal trowing anymore. This made right click very lonely indeed.

To remedy this I've decided to implement secondary actions to weapons. For melee weapons, it's a blocking mechanic while in range ones it's a zoom mechanic.

Guarding

In melee weapons, the secondary action is some kind of guard. It doubles your defence stat while pressing and holding the secondary action button.

You can block any actual attacks, both melee and ranged too.

But there's more!

Parry

Another possible thing is to parry an attack. To do this the player needs to let go of the secondary action button precisely as an enemy attack.

Unlike guarding, this technique mirror back the attack to their opponent. This is extremely gratifying to pull it off, but all of this needs to be planned ahead, as you only get a couple of frames to parry an attack.

Also, you cannot do a quick parry. If you quickly let go of the secondary action button you will instead get punished by not only not doing a parry but also have a long cooldown too.

Zoom

Secondly, range weapons (such as bows and guns) also get a secondary action as some kind of zoom.

While holding the secondary action button the player's view will zoom in, making it easier to aim.

While zoomed in, the mouse sensitivity will be greatly reduced, helping along with the aiming.

There are no statistical benefits with zooming whatsoever. It's just really useful when you're having bad aim.

Like guarding, getting in and out of it will induce a longer cooldown, so don't screw around too much!

The Jungle

Secondly, there's also been some kind of aesthetic upgrades, especially to the first level.

Basically, I've changed my prop algorithm to add support for level-specific ones. This effectively meant that different props will appear in different levels, making each level feel a little bit different from each other.

Right now I'm focusing on the jungle one, so let's see what's up...

Super Ferns

First new prop is the super ferns.

In rainforests (the main type of forest casually associated with jungles), there is a lot of types of perennial vegetation, especially ferns.

So it was a no-brainer to include those in the game (especially for the first level). Luckily, I already fully modelled a leaf of those type of ferns. It was just a matter of merging several duplicates of that model and boom, got yourself a rainforest fern.

take a look :

Anthurium Sagittatum

Another really striking rainforest plant that I've fallen in love with is the Anthurium sagittatum plant.

As you can see their leaves got a really distinctive shape that I just got to include in the game.

Here's what I got:

The Liana is back

Also, the liana is back from the dead!

It previously used as a placeholder to test my room algorithm, but now it's back in full force!

With the new shader and Ambient Occlusion, I've got to say that it looks a whole lot better than previously.

And with all those new props the jungle level slowly starts to look a whole lot like a jungle:

And I'm technically not done yet!

Minor Updates

The refactor continues! I was able to shed about 10 MB whit all that duplicated code removed. With all those duplicated codes removed, it's now a whole lot cleaner. I've even managed to remove some typos and duplication corruptions here and there too.

Fixed a bug with the animation state machine not being properly set up, meaning that attacks and guarding can override each other.

Fixed a bug with 3D catenary slopes (like lianas and bridge ropes) not ending correctly.

Upgrade the double-sided shaders to have better lighting when the geometry's normals are facing away from the camera (i.e. when we're looking inside the mesh) Also added some two-sided shading to appropriate models too!

Fixed some problems with the level mesh generator generating meshes where it shouldn't.

Removed most lighting probes references to static assets (because, you know, procedural generation)

Next Week

So next week I'm going to continue with the level-specific props and whatnot while looking at bugs too. I'm still planning to have something by the end of the month, or maybe by mid-March if there's any holdup, but we'll see.

Otherwise, it's the usual suspects.

So that's pretty much it! See you next week!