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Malevolent Planet 2D - Things are in motion
🕑 Added 2022-09-07 13:50:53 +0000 UTCHey! Despite the hardship of using my old PC, I persevered and did some things to speed development up a bit.
Before I get into it, I'd like to announce that I bought a new PC component for my drawing PC even though it was supposed to be fixed by warranty to not wait too much on that. This means that next week I'll be able to draw again.
Alright, onto development things now. I've been lucky and the older PC didn't crash while drawing smaller assets (like the textures/sprites that make up the above image) and this allowed me to design the map a bit and make it more beautiful.
In addition to that, I've managed something that will improve the performance in the game. In the demo, all the maps are loaded at the same time so there's no actual level/scene loading, it's all the same (except for the main menu and the credits).
That comes with some downsides, such as it being more difficult to separate logic between different areas (like the player bedroom and the medical room) in addition to using more memory and possibly more computation power to keep things running in the background.
So what I've managed is basically loading scenes as they're needed, thus allowing you to actually move to a different scene/level and not wait for a loading screen to complete.
A basic example is that if you're in Room A and you can only move to Room B and Room C, Room B and Room C will be loaded in the background when you enter Room A and when you enter Room B it'll already be loaded. At the same time, if Room B and Room C aren't directly connected the other one will be unloaded in the background and loaded back in when you go back to Room A.
And in practical terms, this means that if you go to your bedroom at the ISA I can easier set up unique content that happens depending on what happened during the day/after you exited the room.
Lastly, here's what will happen soon.
Once I get my PC back:
- I'll draw the content for the ISA Garden.
- Because of the aforementioned changes, I can release content step-by-step (when a level is done, I can just release it and you'll be able to access its content freely)
- Release Day1 with ISA Garden fully playable in early access to Patrons, depending on the tier.
- Work on first day as a nurse content so that I can release Day1 ISA Medical Room Content after.
This is part of the "GaaS" plan because you won't have to wait for all the content to be released and instead can play it as every level required for Day1 is developed and content-filled.
This leads to more frequent updates (because levels are developed faster one-by-one rather than all-by-one), faster access to feedback, more transparent development.
Thank you for your attention. I hope I'll come back with more updates soon.
