Let there be light in Vibe City
We've been busy, opened up a bunch of systems at the same time and it took a bit longer to get all of them to the finish line. It didn't help that all three of us had work on other projects too, but such is life. We're happy it's done and we can hardly wait for our next playtest to get some feedback.
Build 0.6.3.1
migrated to URP 2D
new character customization options, picker & randomizer
revamped all our old skins and added a bunch of new skins
2D lighting system
atmospheric particles & fog
camera movement update, lookahead and zoom based on player's speed
toast notifications system
revamped some of our shaders
EMP effects and area updated
revamped player particle systems (flame, trail, gboots, EMP)
powerup UI update and integrated it with the toast notification
rebalanced powerups
new community quests
dancing sprite lights sync better with the radio
performance updates
fixed A LOT of bugs
URP to URP 2D
This one was long overdue. We tried it in the past, but gave up on it since it broke some of our game. But now it's done and we have better shaders, 2D lights and a more suitable rendering pipeline for a 2D game.
But the real reason behind the lighting update was to address some of the feedback we were getting about the character feeling like it was floating on top of the city canvas instead of being part of it.
Some of our 'sprite lights' that sync with the beat of the radio station received a light component on top of it that affects players. Same goes for the police drones, jetpack, EMP or the powerup drones.
On top of that, we replaced our sprite clouds with a three layer camera fog parallax that becomes denser with altitude. We also added some dust particles! For these two updates, big shoutout to SasquatchBGames, so many good tips on their youtube channel! Not only did I learn a lot for this update, but now have a bunch of other ideas for the future. Thank you sir, your work is priceless!
And there's still work to be done here, I think we might update the entire city parallax at some point. We're happy with the street level, but there's more tinkering to be done the higher up you go, on both scene and background camera layer. It takes some time to learn the ropes, but we're getting there with every single update.
Character customization update
Redoing the rig and some of the animations didn't sound fun, but now we have a more robust system to skin our characters and adding new sets got so much easier. Until we decide to change the rig again - I hope not, but we might!
Another shoutout, to RustyStorm this time, not only did she update all of our old sets, but also added a lot of new ones. And there could be a few more in store here, now that we have this new standard.
And I have my green-gold-black set now, ya mon!
Toast Notification System
We needed a place to display various events that happens in the game (eg. Pawn Shop OPEN) but we're also using it to announce when you get a buff (power-up) or debuff, showing name, icons and a short description. Our old buff/debuff system was a bit unclear, especially on controller/steamdeck.
In the future we plan to hook into this system to also give tips and tricks and maybe some sort of tutorial if need be.
Performance Updates
There was a bit of technical debt from learning and iterating fast, leaving systems in a 'good enough' state. We went back and updated a lot of them, cleaned some logs and fixed a bunch of race conditions, cut some of the update() methods and cleared all the bugs we could find.
CPU and GPU load went down and the ram still hovers around 400MB, even after we kept adding a lot of stuff to the game. I'm sure there's more, a lot more that can be done here - in the end it's a 2D game that should run on a toaster or a smart fridge xD. We're not there yet.
Demo release?
Our plan WAS to release a public demo this winter and take it from there. But we might might start playing with weekly/weekend playtests on Steam and release the DEMO on NextFest.
Until then, we do run playtests on our discord, so feel free to join and participate in the next one.
On behalf of our team (Jamayk, RustyStorm & MrPhilipJoel), I thank you for your attention and see ya next time!
