What has happened in June

So we have been doing different stuff this month, so let’s dive into it.

As you know from last month, we told you about the issues with UI and such.

We are proud to announce that we now have a fully functioning UI for the Login, Main Menu
and Lobby section.

Progress continues on the gameplay, fine-tuning across the board and ensuring the game
stays snappy and responsive.
We like the idea of adding a user-friendly pie-menu design, so this needs consideration on
how to design the pie-menu so that it feels intuitive and efficient to use. Ideas are pouring in
on that front so we’re trying to sift through them and pluck out the ones we like the most.

So there’s a lot of progress on the UX side which we feel is crucial in the way the game feels
for the player and overall look and feel of the game. We’re eagerly looking forward to showing
it off to you all.

The coding side is always a bit of a minefield and oftentimes developers use pre-made tools
called plugins, which are basically blocks of complex code-base where somebody
encountered a common problem and decided to make a solution that could be recycled for
future use.
These plugins can be incredibly useful for slashing the time it takes to have a
bug-free code that does exactly what you want.
The time it takes to make a plugin can be saved by being able to use it for future projects.

So as you can imagine, we like using plugins. But what happens when these plugins don’t
work properly? Sometimes, the platform is updated and these plugins fail to work properly.
We tried contacting the authors with little luck

So we thought, “Why not make our own plugins?”.
So that’s exactly what we’re doing! This is a lot of hard work but well worth it for the future as
these tools will come in handy for many other things and perhaps they could even be made
available to other developers.

So what about our Characters?
Well regarding our characters , we have been giving them a major overhaul.

We started to fixup our textures and move it over to one huge texture, so that means we
moved all the tiles from textures into one huge one – One texture to rule them all!

Many of you might ask, why we didn’t do that from the start, and the answer for that is very
simple.

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll know we’ve had many different artists over the
past 2 years to look over our characters, and few of them knew how to pick up from the
former artists’ work when they had to take over.

But since we finally found someone who could work with this, we decided it was about time
to get the texture tiles into 1 texture, so we could start focusing on reducing draw-calls in-game.

So what are draw-calls? In short, it’s basically a function call for GPUs which takes time to process.
The less draw-calls there are, the more stable and less laggy the game will be (more FPS!).

This also includes the environment assets as well, with the same principle being applied to
those models as well.

We have been focusing on the performance and backend for prototyping for a ”VERY” long
time, and now we are at the point where we can start to polish the whole thing, and try to get
it ready to be tested by everyone, and of course, it’s always the finishing touches that take
longer than expected, but we’re trying to get through it as fast as we can despite us being
only a small team of indie devs. We’ll get there!

But yeah that was it for this time.
Zee yaa all next month!