itch.io

nice! 👍

I plan on modding in the future - but engine is not quite there yet 🤔
I'm not into weapon attributes myself so I won't be adding any of that 🤔

it feels like the dotcom boom all over again 🤔
right now there is an investor frenzy (which is kind of like a piranha frenzy ) 
 people are not sure how to make a lot of money with AI
but convinced themselves that it will be figured out any day now 👀
in practice it's seems to be just a cost saving tool - speeding up everyday things
but it's also a fad - many people are already tired of it  😓

and the demo is now ready 👀

is the game on the right track?  🤔
or are there major flaws? 😨

judge for yourself:
https://mutantleg.itch.io/zortch-2-test

the early bird gets the first 👀

I'd like to once again thank everyone who helped with testing! 😊

Let me shill some of their projects:

First of all Dom and his beloved thugs:

- do not quit your job: at least not until you make more from making games than your job 
- do not try to enter the mainstream game industry: we are in the age of digital games where anyone can sell games online 
- self taught and online tutorials are best option: formal game dev courses are worthless and there are better free ones all over the net
you have made basic projects -> great, move on to advanced projects  🤔

the sensible trick is to figure out the gameplay first and design the story around it 
but it's a lot harder than it sounds:
usually you either have gameplay that is good but very abstract
or some grand epic story that is difficult to break down into levels or bosses 🤔
so my advice is not to worry about perfect balance -
be ready to compromise either if it makes the game more entertaining
and getting it right first certainly won't work - it takes a lot of iteration 
and the end result is hardly ever what you had in mind at the start anyway 🤔

the testing is going well - I got a lot of help with testing now
and it was a good idea to not leave it for last this time 🤔

of course it's ironic that the public testing also has a pre-testing phase
but that is the way the cookie crumbles 🍪
it's more of a psychological thing - better not let people exposed to potential big bugs 🤔

soon everyone will can play the demo for real
very soon here on itch
and a few weeks after the game gets through the tedious
approval process on steam 🤔

some highlights on what has been fixed in the past week:

the lightmap generation got fixes - and I completely had to re-lit the map

here is an area without filtering 

there were a lot of mistakes - but mostly with filtering:
- pixels extended to the edge of the image and this broke blurring
- blurring the image without using the triangles for a mask introduced smudging
- I didn't do dot product tests between the light and surface normals
i'm on the fence about this one as I also invented a cheap way for ambient light with not using them
but now everything looks proper and more oldschool 🤔
 

so with the proper normals this whale skull looks a bit weird with hard edges

rocks look a lot less natural but I kind of like it  🤔

there were some major bugs:
- I only saved the first 16 weapon slots from 32 - making the pugon pistol lost in saves 😔
- Zortch was not shown in the guided missile view - I coded it out accidently with the vehicles
- gibs were floating after you loaded a game - their groundpos was not saved
- ladders used dot products wrong to see if you were facing them - dot products seem to be my arch enemy 🤔

guided missile view - Zortch thinks she is in a car 👀

and here it is fixed 🤔

for my next trick I will try and make the gamepad work properly
unfortunately nobody testing has tried it with a gamepad
and I don't play with it much either
so all shenanigans will come out when testing will become public for real 🤔

until next time 👋