November Update (skateboard pre-orders!)

Ok, let's start with the cool thing! For the patron-exclusive stuff, scroll to the bottom.

Board Pre-Orders

Check it out! We've partnered with DJ Skate to produce SkateBIRD skateboards (like actual skateboards for skating, not cheap decorations) and you can pre-order them here! https://djskate.com/

Canonically, this means @skatebirb is now a Pro. They have a deck line! They're very proud.

October Progress

This month was a lot of level and mission design (that we can't show cus secret), which meant establishing scale for my artist in a very silly way. We needed a clear scale reference for anything we build, and the size of a tech-deck is pretty well established, so that's the logical transfer metric. We then do a bit of eyeball schooching of scale to make it feel right, but this gets us close.

I've also been trying to get speed to feel more, er, speedy, and part of that was giving the bird different motions at different speeds.

Also we gave birb anime eyes and hair because... because I don't even know anymore, heh. Also added more head items, and ALSO added beak items. The idea with stuff held in beak is sure, decorative clothing stuff will be fun, but it also gives us a place to mount items that you pick up mid-mission. So if we have you go get a popcorns to bring back to the mission giver, we can pop it in your beak on the way back. Stuff like that! Also flowers, because, flowers.

I finally took the time to make a big image set of all possible clothing and species and everything else, which you can see some of here:

Main reason I did these was for character design. It got really old trying to remember what species were available, what clothing, etc. NO MORE! HAH HAAAA!

and then I did sets for every other clothing type and that's missing the latest clothing items but you get the idea anyways. That all fed into the tons and tons of level design work, new characters, got most of a level just, done, now. Progress is going pretty great!

Oh and Nathan released a new track from the SkateBIRD OST! Enjoy!

The Logic Of Gap Detection

To explain, gaps are a thing from a lot of skate games (and also just - skating), wherein the goal is usually to do a particular trick whilst in the air between a particular point A and B, sometimes with the requirement that you be doing a particular trick during take off into the gap, or landing after crossing through the gap. Hence, you know, gap.

You'd imagine they're easy, right? You need to hit this spot in the area, so hey, just make some logic to check all the gaps and go.

Buuuut wow it is not that simple. First thing that comes up: what if you hit other gap detectors mid-gap, that don't relate to the gap you just did? Any given gap probably has a lot of different ways of transiting it, and we need to sometimes detect multiples of those and score them differently. Oh and you can do it either way, so that's just extra fun.

This happens because we can't just float a detector in mid air. Then you could fly through it from anywhere and we'd go "gap done!". No no, we need a detector showing that you left from the specific spot, doing the specific thing, and THEN hit through the air, and THEN landed in the specific spot.

Oh but wait. What if you actually don't have enough speed, and you do hit the middle detector, but fall to earth before hitting the landing... and then you skate over like a jerk and just touch the last spot from the ground. That ain't a gap. But that means we ALSO need to listen for how much time you spent on the ground, and how quickly you were able to do the gap.

... because it just gets weirder from there. Can we ban you from touching the ground? No! Because often your take-off point is a ramp, and you're canonically rolling at that point. Can we just hard limit it based on time? No! Because depending on speed, you could take the gap REALLY high and slow, or really fast and straight-across, or etc.

And we haven't even gotten to the "oh and you gotta do this specific trick in the gap" ones. AAAAHHHH.

It's a nightmare. But hey it works now! I'll send the code over to the code tier folks to squint at. Have fun!