Happy Belated New Year! (also what ive been up to)

Howdy Ya'll,

It's ya boi Mr. Thee. Sorry its been a hot couple months since i last wrote here - i should try to make it a point to at least post monthly.

Rest assured that all things r running pretty smoothly on Warp Soldier, and even my other endeavors.

A good chunk of the past month was working on one of those other endeavors: Project ToadSkater

I was originally gonna keep working on this prototype until the end of January for an IRL showcasing space (more specifically: Genesis 8 - a massive Smash Bros tournament in Norcal). However, because of COVID19 concerns, the Genesis 8 organizers opted to delay the event till April, a decision which I support. I miiiiiight try to get a WIP/demo for this ready by the end of the month, or in the next few weeks, and make it readily available here on itch dot eye oh.

The more important consequence of this event delay is I now have more time to focus on Warp Soldier again \o/. I was a little bit worried about shifting gears back onto WS, but weirdly enough I've gotten a lot of difficult things accomplished for that game in just the past week.

Here's a tiny teaser of a "new" biome: the caves

At first glance, you'll see that most of these tiles aren't anything new - the only new stuff here are the big mushrooms and what appear to be rail-tracks.

Let's take a closer look:

That's right. Slopes baby! We Super Mario Bros 3 now \o/

What made these tricky to implement was the fact that most of this game is actually simulated in sub-pixels space. While floating-point numbers are being used in designs specs, the heart of Warp Soldier's physics operates in the domains of integers, NOT real numbers. On older hardware which lacked floating-point, this was not that uncommon. And while i could drive the character's movement using the good-old y =mx+b or c = at + b while on slopes (or even on level ground), i see some potential merit in just rasterizing the line as a bunch of 2x1 pixel rectangles in the physics geometry buffer and letting the player ascend if they touch a 1-pixel-high obstacle. A big one being that i don't have to deal with skin thickness and other iffy floating-point-space workarounds. iirc even games like Overwatch calculate their physics in a space at only centimeter-level precision. Skatefrog, on the other hand, operates using skin-thickness workarounds since it leans of Unity's Spherecasting API.

Maybe I'll save the whole topic of physics engines for a separate blog post.

But yeah, in terms of Warp Soldier stuff, I'm working on caves 'n' slopes 'n' castles 'n' blocking out LARGE chunks of the game work, all of which can now potentially have slopes if the design seems to benefit from it.

And of course monsters:

Oh yeah - continuous-rectangle-shaped lasers are now a thing I can play with when designing monsters. Along with casting kinda-BS AOE spells that home on the player.

Maybe I'll throw those dudes into the Gauntlet Tower the next time i update the demo. Maybe i'll make a tiny bit of the cave exploreable.

What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments below! And don't forget to subscribe, hit that like button, and ring that bell!

But in all seriousness, Happy New Year! Wishlist ya boi via http://www.warpsoldier.com/ if you haven't already.

Oh, before i forget - I have a twitch channel at www.twitch.tv/mr_thee , and this year i wanna spend a little more time streaming dev there. I'll probably go live for few days next week, but i haven't worked-out a schedule yet.

Okay, now I think that covers everything. Thank you for reading and thank you for playing.

Much Love - Mr. Thee