Merry Xmas from Puppygames!

Well, here we are at the end of 2019. I've posted in a while because I've been dead busy on all the things. Some of the fruits of our labour are shown in that little video clip above.

That's the current state of Battledroid, that is (unfortunately YouTube has compressed it rather a lot). We've got the Voxoid engine working fully within the Battledroid UI. Just today I ironed out the last of the memory leaks. As a quick recap, here's where we were two years ago:

In the last couple of months we've been working on the particle engine to ensure it does the sorts of particle effects that Chaz wants it to do, and they're looking great:

Over the Christmas holidays Dan and I both get time off of doing our Real Jobs, and we're going to spend some of it getting the sun, moon, stars, clouds, skybox, and fog all working nicely in the scene.

The skybox is currently implemented properly using Rayleigh scattering, though it needs to blend to the ground colour below rather than black or it looks rather odd as you can see in the video if you look closely.

Fog and ground mist will be implemented with Mie scattering, and a more distant blend to the skybox background. 

After the atmospherics are all worked out we'll move on to finishing off the water (which is still just a WIP really). It needs to be smooth, with varying height waves, and animation applied to a bump map, as well as texturing and foam.

2019 was a great year for progress - I reckon 2020 will see things zooming along nicely!

In Other News

Paul of Pumpkin Games continues apace with Glitchangels. Expect a playable alpha in the next quarter.

Brian is working hard on Faerie Solitaire Dire, which should also have an alpha ready for you, imminently.

Stay tuned for announcements! 

Huge Thanks!

I would just like to take this opportunity to thank all of you supporting us right now and over the last few years. We literally couldn't continue without you - Patreon is entirely supporting Chaz now, plus a few residual bucks left over from our game sales on Steam (which are terrible, even during the sales). Let's just say that fortunately Chaz seems to survive off of coffee and tobacco because he's certainly feeling the pinch.

We're not sure how to increase our Patreon funding yet... we've tried a few experiments with posting lots of little clips of our work on Twitter and using their newfangled "Promote Mode", but nothing seems to be bringing any new Patreons to the cause, and every time I post we lose a few more! Anybody got any ideas?