maruvr

Surgery Recovery and General Updates

I've been recovering from some surgery for most of the last month but I should be more active again going forward. Tonight I did a quick update of the arcade world's highscores and made a little page to display them that loads from the same source.

https://marutypes.github.io/vrchat-static/arcade-highscores.html

The next step for scores in the arcade is making them dynamically submittable. I'll also probably work on some of the requested features for the games i've prefabbed (such as auto-leaving OhTorus automatically when walking far enough away)

As for crystal defenders, next up are some more bugs I'd like to squash (my understanding is storm towers are busted, and I need to rework how purchases work to account for ultra-high latency).

Crystal Defenders Update, Upcoming Life Stuff

Version 1.2.1 of Crystal Defenders is out now! It includes a bunch of fixes folks have asked for as well as some tweaks to the experience on phones, and it updates us to Unity 2022!

In other news, I'll be out of commission for at least a month starting in the middle of this week, recovering from some medical stuff. I can maybe fix anything that's gone wrong by the end of monday, so let me know if you find any bugs :)

Arcade Update 2.6 and Prefabs!

I've pushed a new update to the arcade featuring:
- global highscores! They are pulled live from the web, and can be submitted in my discord. (In the future I'll look into a better submission process)
- a rebuilt and much upgraded Face Invaders with coop play

See the changelog in world or at https://github.com/marutypes/vrchat-static/blob/main/public/arcade-changelog.md for more details.

I've also, after many requests, finally gotten some of my games up for sale as prefabs. You can find them on my gumroad or booth pages. If folks want I can put them here too.

https://marumakes.gumroad.com/

Arcade Update 2.5

Just uploaded a new version of the arcade with a bunch of fixes and features, most interestingly a full rules engine for OhTorus, making it a true automated game. Check out the changelog for the full details!

https://github.com/marutypes/vrchat-static/blob/main/public/arcade-changelog.md#250---2023-11-21

My first gumroad package

I had this in drafts for weeks, but now I finally have time to get some of this stuff done! If you are a creator and have been wanting the crisp and smooth pixelart shader tech I use in my worlds, take a look. Its 0+ dollars so feel free to grab it and use it on an avatar or world or whatever. Just keep the licenses in there and we're Gucchi.

Surgery woes

Just wanted to let folks know why I've been slow lately, my partner had a relatively major surgery and I've been on full time nurse duty. She is recovering well, but I'll likely continue to have a hard time finding opportunities for dev work for a little longer. Hopefully I can still find time to do some bug fixes or get some of the prefab stuff I wanted to done, but we'll see. Wish her luck!

Crystal Defenders Maintenance Log - Keep your scenes flat

Its the first "behind the scenes content" for y'all. Yay!

The latest update to Crystal Defenders has a bunch of quality of life improvements, but the one that was the most effort is a nice little perf bump just from me reorganizing basically every object in the scene and adopting this tool (https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/hierarchy-folders-157716) which lets me keep the visual hierarchy but eliminate the empty folder objects when I build.

Sometimes the naive thing to do bites you later. Nesting stuff in a Unity scene for organization purposes can be that way. Turns out having a hierarchy nested like Game->Pools->Monster Pools -> Tortl Pool -> (50 instances of Tortl, which each have 3 sub-objects) is not *great*. Same with having projectile pools keep their spawned projectiles nested under them. Its great for looking at play mode and understanding what's going on at a glance, but very not good for the ole' CPU.

Part of the problem of course is just that VRC encourages this behaviour. Object Pools for networked prefabs need to have all their members instantiated *before* you build, and the inability to dynamically load scenes in any way basically locks you into one gigantic scene. You also can't really put code anywhere but GameObjects in VRC, so you end up with a *much* bigger hierarchy than you would have in a "real" Unity app.

Anyway, its better now, and I'm pushing the update out tonight.

I'll be spending my dev time this week on my standalone project (details coming here soon), and possibly throwing some of my stuff on Gumroad, while I think about the best way to handle making NG+ and difficulty settings a bit more interesting for Crystal Defenders down the line.

Check out the attached image for some stats about how big a difference this hierarchy optimization can make.

Crystal Defenders Retro & The Future

Its now been about half a month since Crystal Defenders was released on VRChat. We topped out at 400+ people in-world and there's been 100-200 people there pretty consistently since!

I'm very happy with how much love its been getting, and thankful to my new patrons. We even got featured by some japanese youtubers! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDOY2tSK4U

I'll be trying to do some more frequent updates going forward with what I'm working on, but in brief they're:

- maintenance and tweaks for Crystal Defenders, with some small content updates maybe probably
- prototyping a different VRC idea
- working on a standalone game I hope to be able to show some of soon....

Crystal Defenders IN LABS!

After a year of development Nilled and I finally released Crystal Defenders! I've also updated the arcade with some nicer decore and moved it to Udon 1.0!

https://vrchat.com/home/content/worlds/wrld_d2af6dab-c6fa-4752-b8c5-227addcc5b10/edit

Progress Update

I continue to plug away at two main projects, updating the arcade to Udon 1.x and fixing the bugs it presents, and getting Crystal Defenders over the finish line. In the past month or so I've made a lot of progress on both.

Crystal Defenders Progress:
- LOTS of optimization: We now run at a higher FPS than the default homeworld on quest and 40+ fps even with capped towers and late-game enemy counts.
- Shader polish: I wrote some antialiasing shaders for the pixel art textures, and its dramatically improved how the world feels to be in, especially in VR.
- Improved UX: We redid the entire shop so that its less overwhelming, changed the default interactions to be what people kept assuming they would be (drop to place tower is the big one)
- Balance and mechanics changes: Even the cheapest tower has an active component now, and things have been rebalanced around that. By popular demand among testers flyers are now grabbable, though only if you buy the Yeetlet upgrade.
- Stability: I've continued to refine the custom sync component the game relies on and I think its gotten pretty solid.

Arcade Progress:
- Updated to udon 1.x
- Fixed bugs in some of the games from the transition
- Lots of new detailing in the main floor and some new plushies in the chill room
- Fish
- New world menu that is way nicer and also more useful

I hope to release both the updated arcade and Crystal Defenders in the next week or two. Currently I'm waiting on a trailer I am having someone work on and an avatar that Nilled is plugging away at for Crystal Defenders, and have a couple more fixes to do for the arcade.

Also, In the future I'll try to post one of these more than once a month, now that there are actually a non-zero amount of patrons :P

Wish me luck!

Patreon and Crystal Defenders

So, I created a patreon. I'll be trying to keep it up-to-date and make it the place to go for details of what I've been working on. I'm new to having one of these, so your feedback is most certainly a gift. Let me know what kind of rewards you want to see! I have a lot of ideas but am still testing the waters.

As for what I've been working on, I've been plugging away getting my active tower defense world, Crystal Defenders, done. It's *so* close.

Once it is out I'll probably be revisiting older worlds and updating them to the new VRChat SDK and generally giving them some love.

Until then, I'll be posting some more progress pics here.