Kandria
Oh boy! Tomorrow's the day!
The day Fred is going to start working, that is! This week has all been prep work for that, so it's been mostly bug fixes for the editor and documentation of the game systems and tools. The documentation that I wrote is public in case you're curious.
Towards the end of the week I got time to work on some new engine features like better control over the lighting, and a way to have the parallax background transition between different backgrounds depending on the time or the current chunk the player is in. That should allow enhancing the atmosphere quite a bit! I still need to add tooling to the editor to allow setting the backgrounds and lighting conditions though.
Then tonight I did a short stream where I did a couple of rough drafts of profile animations for Fi. I'd like to get a simple version of a first NPC in soon to make the level a bit more interesting. I'm probably going to stream sporadically now, usually between 20:00 and 22:00 CEST. If you'd like to catch the streams live, you can subscribe on Twitch.
The streams won't be all art, I'll probably also be coding during a bunch of them. I'll also see about uploading them to YouTube again like I did last year. They should all appear in the same playlist.
For the near future I'll continue working on improving the tooling and rendering of the game. I have some ideas on how to fix the broken shadow maps and make those better. It'll take some doing, though.
I've also been thinking about an official beta testers programme. The automated feedback system already helps a lot and there's been a bunch of bugs that have been fixed through that, and that's really great! The actual beta testers however would receive much more frequent releases and they'd also have at least some responsibility to test things if I ask them to and to be available for more in-depth debugging should I be unable to reproduce problems. I'm still hashing out how exactly that should work though. If you're interested in being a beta tester, let me know!
Anyway, for now I'm just really excited (and quite a bit anxious, too) to start working with Fred! I hope the materials and work I did to prep for this mean he won't have too much of a bumpy road getting acquainted with the project. The time difference between him and me are also going to be a challenge to work with, but I hope we can figure it out.
I suppose I'll have at least a bit to talk about that next week already! Oh– and since last week was a new version release, do let me know what you thought of that!