Hello Readers! Just a few days ago, I learned that Kongregate had disabled many of their chat and discussion features, and is no longer accepting new game submissions, as they intend to focus on their in-house titles. That, coupled with the death of Flash in just a few months, gave me a moment to reflect on how amazing, even after twenty-five years, indie developers, players, and backers continue to keep this project going - and going strong! Thank you!
BYOND
BYOND Developer Lummox JR put out a new release for BYOND 513 today, adding more detail to savefile errors, fixing zoom issues, and resolving a perspective problem with side and iso views. During his weekly development logs, particles in BYOND 514 have received the lion’s share of attention, and over on Patreon, particles were discussed further: Making the values, creating the objects, and keeping them active. And as for the CEF project? He made a mention of meaningful progress there on SubscribeStar!
BYOND Games
Darkstar continues to progress, with Bravo1 sharing a video featuring some of the nifty and unique features of the space survival game. The plasma caster has enhanced sound effects, Night vision raises visibility in the dark, and sprinters have upped their predecessor!
Jack Bones: Shards of Memory is getting a little bit clearer, as Raffile announced that Spirit and his brother have crafted new graphics for the main characters, bosses, and enemies! He also hints as to who the new bosses will be and what is next for the game.
Poplava has picked back up on the production of Lootgrinder, celebrating over 500 hours into the project - and halfway to his target time investment for the project. He’s knee-deep in refactors however, relating to dialogues, menus, general game progression, and advancement. New sounds have been added, and he is now in search of a way to avoid distractions during the evenings.
Soma Ryudo is sending out positive vibes in his latest development log for Astral Stigma! In that log, he reports that nearly a dozen status ailments have been added to the game, and while all are detrimental, they also have cures. Also mentioned are improvements in how the AI handles itself in battle, stat point allocations are available, and elemental weaknesses and strengths have been aligned.
Sigrogana Legend 2 has undergone a large number of changes, affecting almost all of the races and many skills. Full details on all of those changes are featured in this novel. Additionally, Shapeshifter is now an available promotion for the summoner class, and Youkai now starts their max level at sixty.
Acebloke is back with an update on the status of Wargames2! He ran into a wall on the border...
Fantastic Martial World has gotten a bit more fantastic, with Lawpiecla1 laying out the newest improvements and his upcoming goals. New realms are ready to be explored, crafts are ready to be made, and talents are better balanced. Next on his agenda is more of the same, with tweaks being made to skills, more skills, and more crafts.
While his artists were working on Jack Bones, Raffile took up the LowRez game Jam challenge and produced Burr’s Low Rez Quest! The gameplay is simple and straight forward, just use your lightning ability to take out the bad guys and work up to the large bad guy and win the level. Enjoy the low-resolution graphics!
Azusa RP Online is going back to the past to experience (and potentially alter) the timeline - 500,000 years prior! Persephone and Pandora’s Secrets is the name of the special event and involves how the Goddess of Spring became the Goddess of Corruption. While several key milestones are fixed, the players can affect the world and anything in between. I don’t believe that the event has yet begun, so you still have time to learn the ropes!
BYOND Resources
- Overrun by a million and one mouse parameters? Ter13 has rebuilt his mouse library to keep the param population under control.
- Ulterior Motives created a dialogue options demo. I can’t say there’s much dialogue, but there are options.
I go into it here:
http://www.byond.com/forum/post/2608211
Also, I've been very tight-lipped on the forums about what I've been up to, but very much spilling the beans on discord:
Thus far, I've got a pretty acceptable lighting engine functioning that heavily uses vis_contents and multiplicative blending alongside a viewport-wide ticker update loop to handle per-object lighting.
With just one user, this uses about 15-20% of the CPU budget on generous system specs, but there's room for improvement to my implementation. Luckily, my project has zero plans for allowing multiple users.
I also harnessed the power of that viewport-wide ticker loop to allow objects to do individually defined behaviors on the fly, which allowed me to implement a foraging system that generates startup and runtime-defined foraging nodes the first time a tile is seen in a given in-game day. This system uses abstract generators that allow me quite a bit of flexibility in how stuff gets generated, so I can do really neat things like rig trees up to generate mushrooms within 1-3 tile of themselves in unoccupied tiles, or create more complex reactions that allow the generator to take nearby objects into account.
I finished the week out working on implementing the UI and rigging up a fairly flexible means of responding to player drag and drop actions that allowed me to hijack the item stacking behavior to handle loading shells into shotguns instead of the regular position swapping behavior.
If you wanna share in the madhouse of mutual motivation masturbation that's going on in BYONDiscord, feel free to pop in with the third social link above at the bottom of Higoten's post!