MeshiSoftworks

General Update: 12/16/24

    Hello again! The past week of dev went great, with a lot of really terrible spaghetti code getting cleaned up. This is quickly becoming the build where I finally finish fixing up all my old work, and honestly I'm all for it. It feels great to get all these loose ends tied up, and I really can't think of a better way to start the next year of development.

    As you can see above, I've also been remaking the unit details screen to be more leg...

General Update: 12/09/24

    Work continues on the next update! I'd like for modding to be more or less finished this update in a way that and mods created for it can be reliably carried forward, so I've been working on a few different fronts to achieve that. The nice part is, I'm using a very similar process to modders to add in official characters, so the easier I can make it for them, the easier it becomes for me.

    Most recently, I've been remaking the block...

Dev Journal: Second Year of Development in Review

    I can't believe it's already been another year... It feels like just yesterday I was writing last year's review. This year we added six new characters, Cheshire, the four goblins, and Atlas-Agena, and one new skin for Covenant. Antares came on board as a 3D artist, and has already made one new tileset for the game. A main menu and gacha animation were added, which I hope to polish more in the future, and you can save and load your game now. The game has gone through a ...

Skin Spotlight: Ghastly Bride

    As darkness falls and All Hallow's Eve arrives, a nun undergoes a ghastly transformation... Her teeth grow sharp and wicked, her nails turn to cruel claws, her skin turns to a grey pallor, and the scar from her grisly execution manifests itself upon her neck. She has become a creature of the night- a ghoul, hungry for human flesh. Her first victim? The makeup artist herself who had so deftly applied the transformation. How many more must broil away within this monster'...

Vessel Tactics v0.12a

Sorry this took a bit, the game should be a lot more playable now!
NOTE: I fixed all the bugs with modded units I could, but the chimera and other units with nonstandard stomachs are still not set up to be used in battle.

EDIT v0.12a.1:
A patch for this build has been released with the following changes:

• Theano's WG on her base skin no longer bugs out at max weight

• Shaman's womb no longer turns into a clone of her with a full stomach

• Cov...

  2024-11-19 00:55:17 +0000 UTC View Post

Character Spotlight: Atlas-Agena

    A vessel designed for long-duration spaceflight by the shadowy organization Xenognosis. The nature of her missions meant that her life was spent almost entirely alone, right up until she first met the Commander. She has since come to regard them as a savior figure, and is devoted to them with all her heart. Even the Commander isn't aware of the full depth of her attachment, viewing her instead as a lonely girl who just needs more friends. Whether the Commander will be ...

Commander Poll

    I've been doing some thinking about how I want to represent the Commander in-game, and I'm a bit conflicted so I wanted to get some opinions here. One the one hand, I'd like for the Commander to be as open as possible for interpretation if people want to self-insert or imagine them as their own character. On the other hand, that requires them to never appear on-screen, and there are some parts of the game that may be better if I can show them. Out of the following, wha...

v0.12 Roundup

Did you find the secret character?

    So, there ended up being three big surprises this update! Since I had to keep them a secret up until now, I want to go over them a bit here now that they've been released. Also, it's actually a complete coincidence so much ended up being hidden this time. In general, I'll keep doing previews as usual.

    First off, I'd like to officially welcome Antares to the team! They will be in charge of d...

Vessel Tactics v0.12 (Spooky Edition)

Alright, finally done! (Pretend this build came out yesterday)

NOTE: Modding has been re-enabled, but at the expense of loading saved games as I try to better integrate that and set up mid-battle saves. Mods made for previous versions of the game will not work without being updated for this build in accordance with the guidelines in the "Read Me First" file.

EDIT v0.12.1: A fairly major bug where units could not properly digest prey in the lobby has been fixed.

Chang...

2024-11-02 03:14:44 +0000 UTC View Post

General Update: 10/28/24

    We're still on track! ...Honestly I don't have much else to say this week, but development is going well. I'd really like to get this build out in time to spend some good time with the Monster Hunter Wilds beta, so hopefully things will line up in such a way that I finish before the 3rd, but I'm going to avoid making any date predictions until I'm absolutely certain going forward lol. Anyway, thank you so much for your support, as always, and if I don't see you before ...

General Update: 10/21/24

    Hey again everyone! I was able to make decent progress last week, and I think we're still looking at an end of October/early November release date. The new stomach system is getting very close to completion and has been fully integrated with the rest of the game, meaning that any existing content is working (mostly) seamlessly with it. I still have more work to do setting up the different vore types and creating scenarios for them, but I think with the framework I hav...

General Update: 10/14/24

    Hey everyone, just a small update on the game's progress this week. So far, it's been going well and I've been getting a few fun things in for the next build on top of the stomach system/Vore Chimera that I think you'll enjoy. Currently, I think I'm still on pace to release the next build around end of October/start of November, but I don't want to guarantee anything just yet.

    I've also been getting a LOT more comfortable with dra...

Character Spotlight: Goblins

    One of the most numerous monsters in the world you find yourself in. While the weakest physically, they more than make up for it in numbers and a general disregard for their own safety. Early in your journey, you'll encounter an elven village beset upon by goblins. While elves are stronger predators than the goblins for all intents and purposes, they are pacifists that do not eat other living beings, and so they appeal for your help in dealing with the threat. Wanting ...

Dev Journal: Mod Loading Finished!

    As soon as I started to add modding to the game, I ran into a problem. VT uses a lot of mid-sized textures to render its characters, and in order to ensure no visual glitches (Missing faces, etc.) these textures ideally all need to be loaded in within a single frame. The reason this is an issue is because Unity cannot display image files as-is, it needs to read the image and convert its data to a Texture first. While this process is very fast, it can still cause an eve...

Dev Journal: Balancing Rarities

    One of the difficulties of adapting the gacha framework for a non-monetized game is what to do with rarities. In VT I'd like for each unit to be useful in their own way, but that runs completely counter to your typical rarity system. After all, in almost all gachas higher rarities are objectively better than lower ones.

   What's nice is, this kind of works in VT, for the most part. Rarity can be used as a measure of a charact...

Vessel Tactics v0.11b

NOTE: Modding is still disabled.

Thank you for your patience! Assuming nothing explodes again, this is the final build of v0.11, and after this I'll be going ahead with my rework of old systems to get modding and a few other things working again, and add in the full stomach system. This is the product of doing a few betas over the course of the week, and I think doing things this way worked really well. As long as the handful of last second fixes I did didn't break anything, this sh...