(Impromptu) Progress Report - Merry Chirstmas

(Impromptu) Progress Report
--Less formal than usual--

Lewd Jam 2017 – First two weeks of December was more or less used for lewd jam entry that did not make the cut. Goal for the entry was a MetroidVania. Something similar to Parasite in City, but with a male protagonist. Also with the native resolution (exactly that of CastleVania SOTN) of 256x208. It started progressing well using some simple things from the CastleRock engine, but also required a lot of new things. At the end of the two weeks I had a basic platformer, with no lewds. Despite the failure, it was a good experience and I learned a bit. For example: Those that have played CastleRock before it had HexTiles, will remember the terrible collision detection that existed when moving around the map. This collision detection / interaction with the environment, was solved quite nicely in the failed entry. Some other things that were experimented with in the Lewd Jam entry, will indeed be carrying over to CastleRock. Screen Scaling/Full Size Windows was done successfully in the entry, and is currently being converted to work with CastleRock. As of today, the Combat State and MainMenu States can be scaled any which way and work properly. However the Control Hub State needs a bit more work. Specifically the way the Hex Tile Map responds to mouse activity while outside native resolution , needs further work.

Alpha 4 Compatibility Issues – Alpha 4 had a lot of unexpected compatibility issues. One of the key problems was a testing workspace for the New Avatar System. While not being used and accessed in the released version, a new shader was still being compiled. This caused some users to crash at run time. The workspace was cordoned off in a way for the patch, but the big underlying problem is, anyone that could not run the Alpha 4 release initially, won’t be able to run the new male/female avatar system when it was released. So targeting compatibility issues is a primary goal right now. Also while troubleshooting ctd’s I discovered some potential memory allocation problems, which might have been the cause for users with older computers that could run the pre alphas, but not alpha 1 or 2.

There is a new awareness that as CastleRock gets more advanced, some of the current player base won’t be able to play it. So, the plan.

The Plan – There will be a couple more Alpha 4 patches introducing some debugging tools, the window sizing, options for command line-error output. Any new content in the works will be saved for the Alpha 5 release. The new avatar system is on hold for the time being, but I have some thoughts in regards to a male pc option or at least a recruitable male party member in Alpha 5.

Happy Holidays.