Hey everyone, I hope you all had a good Christmas and are feeling ready for the New Year! I've actually done more with Squillamorph than I expected to and most of it is visual, yay!

The problem this shader has at the moment is that the only thing that limits the distortion to the solid areas is the low res filter image; meaning things excluded from the distortion can still appear in the distorted area. Ideally, I would put the scenery I wanted to be affected on a different camera and then have the camera render to a texture. Then I would put the texture on a mesh in the final scene. I did try this but I couldn't get the texture resolution the right size. I will attempt it again but as it isn't a massive priority it won't be for some time. If I do fix its issues, the shader could have many uses.

A Smol Shark
I want to make a few variations of the shark to create more interesting gameplay. Nothing extreme, just slight alters to the existing shark to make gameplay more interesting. If I hadn't used a scriptable object method to assign the base stats of creatures then making a variation of the shark would have been much harder. All I had to do was duplicate the existing shark scriptable object, alter the speed and health values, and change the size and spacing of the sprites. I also altered the tint of the sprites temporarily to make it easier to differentiate the shark types. Now there is a smaller, faster, but weaker shark. I still need to test it properly but just messing around with the prototype was a lot of fun.

The past week has been a tough one. I really wanted to get something done for the Unity 2D Challenge which meant less time for Squillamorph. I also got ill again, that helped. In short, there isn't too much to talk about again. Nevertheless, there is something. :)

Pathfinding
I've reverted back to my heatmap method again, what a surprise! I'm doing things differently now though. Rather than pathing straight to the player. Enemies now path to one of a number of stationary points near to the player until they are close enough to use a much smaller dynamic heatmap that the player now generates. This means I can pre-generate heatmaps for each of those points. This is much better for performance but still needs work. Ideally, I would have a heatmap for every single tile. What a surprise though, generating an array of every tile for the total number of tiles crashes Unity. Yes I did try it. :D

What I am probably going to do is increase the number of pre-generated points and make the dynamic heatmap much smaller, or even find a completely different solution for close range pathfinding. While fixing these performance issues will take time, if I fix them now it will result in better features down the line.

Well I hope you don't mind the shorter update. I don't expect to have much to talk about in the next one as it is coming up to Christmas. Thanks for reading!

​If you are interested in the game I made for the Unity 2D Challenge you can check it out here: 

Hey everyone, this week's post will be shorter than normal. I'm currently working on 3 projects, one of them being Squillamorph, and its proving difficult to progress them all as much as I'd like.