September Update

I started with playing more with the wire-tool my partner made, including making birb grind the loopy, showed off one of the fun transfer step-ups later in the game, and really pushed the ramp tool my partner made to the limit. She built it to do a ton of stuff, but until this level rough-out I'd only ever really made normal ramps. These were tricky to fit, though, requiring a tweaked radius and a tiny bit of vert surface to make it all line up right. In the end, it lines up so well that you can't easily tell how different these ramps are to skate, which is a problem, because they are VERY different to skate. You can't gain speed on them in a normal way. Probably need to at least give them a different appearance in the final level to make that clear. Anyways, end result, level 4 graybox is complete.

It was around this point we started prepping for the Tokyo Game Show, which meant backing off on core stuff. So I made a title screen finally, yay! Also finally cleaned up loading with a nice loading screen and fade out and in and stuff. Oh and birb skated Southbank, so that was fun.

Couple new tracks from the OST got uploaded too, so, enjoy!

Part of title screen was finally making language selection/loc testing a thing, and THAT meant I could finally add the Birbinator / Dudinator to the game. Which is extremely fun, woo. More importantly, I also added some accessibility stuff to the game, like the ability to set game speed. The point is to give folks a bit more reaction time, and honestly the game feels perfect even at 90%? 80% gives you some slight floatiness, but might be especially nice for nights where you just want to chill and vibe. Or take it down even lower if you want. It's cool!

Somewhere in here we did the TGS event, and that went well. Got a lot of folks to try the demo, got a lot of feedback, was able to address most of it within the show even. One huge point of feedback was that NO ONE mentioned the camera this time! I did one tiny tweak that had a big impact, and that... might... have finally fixed it? Not entirely sure. I think I need to add a hard-lock camera mode it blends more smoothly to when you do the tilt-up-and-spin action, since there's a nasty pop in there otherwise. Then if I have that anyways, exposing a hard-lock camera option should be easy? Dunno, worth testing anyways. Point is, I think camera is ALMOST done. Finally! I think we've caught all the major stuff! We're maybe ready to ship! YES!

After that, I moved into mission mechanics. Every favor you do for a bird is a set of goals which must be completed in order or in any order, whether that be Do A Trick, or Grab These Things, or Don't Go Here, or etc. I finished out the list of those that seemed useful, including a handful of limits (Dont Touch This and Dont Go Here mostly) that clear the other goals if triggered, and that's it. Everything is composed of those. Once they're done, we start mission design and implementation!

Oh and now birb dances when you get going fast.

What I just barely finished is the concept of gaps. Those are another hyper-critical element for missions, because gaps let you specify very specific things. "Grind this rail and ollie and do a kickflip in the gap and then grind the rail on the other side" kinds of things. They're an exploration element that's just fun to discover as you play around in a map, but they're also a way of packaging most complicated mission goals into a catch-all detector. So instead of a super complicated series of tricky goals, we just say "hit this gap" in the detector, and tada, done.

The logic is awful for it. It's SO BAD. The fiddly ways you have to work around what gaps are are just... anyways if you're a $3+ tier patron you'll see, I figure I'll just share it to gawp at. I've written a lot of horrifying code this month, and it's all necessarily horrible. Not even avoidably so! AAAAA! I even hit bugs in the dang code editor this month!

 Anywho, in short, we're into production phase and I'm running out of missing things to implement. It's fun! Should be starting on the next map soon, while Xalavier starts writing this one.