Indy Popcon
Pictures!
This was a lot of fun, but unfortunately I won't be going back next year. There were maybe ten games total; most of the con focused on unlicensed pop culture stuff and YouTube personalities. Most people were not interested in my game at all, but those who did sit down and play almost always went away with a huge grin on their face, so that was encouraging!
Gameplay recording
I recorded almost 400 MB of gameplay. This works by blasting all network packets from the server directly into a file, then playing them back in order. I can record an 8 minute play session in under 10 MB.
The only downside is that the network protocol does not capture camera angles, so I can only watch replays in this weird top-down view.
Here's some highlights:
Right player stalks left player from the top of a pillar
Left player captures a battery but immediately gets smashed
Right player gets overwhelmed by left player's minion army
Left player does a good job of staying behind their minions
Right player holds their own against minions, left player not so much
I got a ton of player feedback from Indy Popcon, which means I have a huge list of cool stuff to work on. A few notable changes already implemented:
Camera culling
Yes I'm still improving this. Previously I used a cone shape to cull geometry between the camera and the player's drone. The issue was that, if you backed up close to a wall, it would intersect with the narrow part of the cone, leaving you a tiny circle to see through. I switched from a cone to a paraboloid, which slightly improved the situation:
There was another issue as well. When transitioning from one surface to another, the player's rotation lerps smoothly, which is nice. The problem was that, all the culling planes were based on this lerped rotation, which resulted in a lot of popping and graphical artifacts during the lerp. Now the culling transitions immediately from one surface to the next, while the player model still lerps smoothly.
Cooldown tweaks
Previously, after a cooldown, all three of your jumps recharged instantly. Now they recharge individually, similar to Overwatch's Tracer, which was the original inspiration for this system. The difference with this new system is, the first jump takes a long time to recharge, while the other two recharge much faster. I want to give players an interesting choice here: do you immediately use the first jump because it's an emergency, or do you wait a split second longer to gain more future mobility?
That's all for now. Big changes in progress. Next milestone is GDEX in September.