Ability Particles | Patreon Weekly #101

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s a new Patreon Poll running!This one covers some potential improvements to alchemy items.

I spent last week working on v0.9.3, and while it’s not quite ready yet, I do have some things to show off!

v0.9.3 Progress

Right now for v0.9.3 I still need to round out implementations for a few of the armor abilities, and finish implementing a challenge version of Yog. There isn’t really any new design to show off, but I do have a couple pretty neat gifs!

Several of the armor abilities affect an AOE, which has given me an excellent opportunity to extend the cone AOE effects used by fireblast and regrowth. The most natural fit was the Warrior’s shockwave ability, which looks quite nice indeed with some blast wave particles:

The Mage’s Elemental blast needs a bit more work on implementation, but on the visual front it’s doing great! It’s basically a 360 degree cone, and I’ve treated it as such for its visuals. Each wand gets a different particle effect, can you guess which wands these are?

If all goes well I think I’ll be able to get v0.9.3 to beta at the end of this week. If not, I’ll have another update for you guys in the next weekly.

iOS Progress

There has also been a little progress on the other side of Shattered’s development. Shattered’s TestFlight has run into a little trouble, but issues were expected and so it should still arrive on schedule.

Just like Google Play, the iOS AppStore has some built-in crash reporting functionality, but it’s running into trouble with Shattered’s code. Because of the way Shattered is ported, the backtrace (where the crash occurred outside of Java code) isn’t particularly helpful, but the crash message (which can include info about the java code) is helpful. Unfortunately, Apple’s system only includes the backtrace, not the crash message!

The ultimate solution for this is to implement a crash reporting tool (like Crashlytics, which I already use on Android), but in the interest of time I’m taking a more quick and dirty approach for now. If Shattered on iOS crashes, you might see something like this when you next launch it:

If you do, please send me a screenshot! This is basically me getting the crash message in a more roundabout way.