Hello everyone! Over the past week, I worked on finding a solution for having leaderboard time entries work with the new hub level game structure. I also spent some time working on ambient visual effects.

It didn't take me long to decide what to do about the leaderboard times issue from last week. I decided that I would only allow times to appear on the leaderboard if a player completes the game content. This means that I don't have to change the way the leaderboard works. It will also clear up the leaderboard somewhat, which was becoming cramped. Another has to be made to accomodate this; when continuing a previously saved game and re-entering a region from the hub level, the recorded play time will no longer reset back to the last time saved at the start of that region. This means that you cannot achieve a faster completion time using a single save and would have to start a new game instead. I believe this is how most speed-runs work anyway, so it feels like the right decision to me. However, if you are unhappy with this, I can easily change it.

After getting that problem out of the way, I started looking for ways to improve the game visuals. What stood out to me is how static the environment is. So I did some research, looking at visuals in 2D games. I found that most of them have animated background elements and ambient particle systems. I can't currently justify the time to animate scenery, so I focused on particle systems. After a lot of tweaking, I came up with a 'dust' particle system. It is a very subtle effect but definitely adds to the atmosphere. I also brought back an old distortion shader I made, to improve the hot pipes with some heat distortion. I intend to add more ambient effects to the game over the next few weeks.

Lastly, I'll mention that I have started work on a new enemy, and the first passive critter. I finally caved to the suggestion of adding multiple enemies into each region. This will significantly delay the game's completion, but it is necessary for the sake of variation and enjoyment. I will not give specifics on what the new enemy is but it will reside in the Waste Processors region alongside the existing Flop Shark enemy. I expect that the levels will have to change slightly to accommodate the new enemy's behaviour, but I hope to be able to show it by the next post. The reason I'm adding passive creatures is to make the game world feel a bit more 'alive'. More info on this in the next post.

I hope you like the ideas I've discussed in today's post. I greatly encourage you to let me know what you think!

Please consider getting Squillamorph on Steam and leaving a review. It is still early in development but the more feedback I get now, the more enjoyable the final game will be!

Join the official Squillamorph Discord server here: 
- Discord Server
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​ Thanks for reading!

Hello everyone! The past week has been quite good for progress. I've finally worked on a visual representation for enemy health and I've also worked on a new idea for the game.

Now that I am able to focus more on the content side of the game, after making progress with optimisation, I wanted to work on something visual. I chose to work on visually representing enemy health, something that was highly requested during play-tests. I like to make gameplay information diegetic where I can, rather than using UI elements such as health bars. I have done this with the enemy health. I've added an extra parameter to the enemy shader that allows me to change its colour saturation. The more damaged an enemy is, the less colour it will have. I also added a secondary texture so I can have some cuts and/or decay appear on the enemy as it becomes more damaged. I am happy with the resulting effect and hope it will improve combat.

The second major thing I worked on last week was a feature I only just decided to add. I've noticed that going back to the main menu when the player runs out of lives doesn't encourage them to continue playing, and also makes it seem as if they've lost more progress than they have. To change this, and give a bit more structure to the game, I have created a hub level. The player will start in this level and return to it upon failing or completing a region. You can choose to go to any of the unlocked regions from this level and also see doors that lead to future regions, which gives the player a visible goal to achieve. The hub level also allows the player to replay previous levels, something I haven't previously allowed without starting a new play through.

There is one downside to this. I am now unsure how to handle the leaderboard 'time' entries. If a player goes back to a previous region, do I reset the time back to what it was when they first got to that region? Do I keep increasing it no matter which region they choose? Do I create fastest time high-scores for each individual region? I am not sure which to choose but I am leaning towards individual fastest times. I would display these in the hub level rather than cluttering the leaderboard and they would carry over between playthroughs. I will still add a time to the leaderboard if the player completes the early access game content no matter what I decide to do.

I am excited to hear what you think about these ideas. So feel free to leave a comment here or on one of the social media platforms. The best option would be to join the Discord Server and leave your thoughts there.

That's it for this post, I hope you like the new progress and ideas. I am going to continue working on the hub level and some more new content this week.​
​
I hope you enjoyed today's post! ​Thanks for reading!

If you like the look of the game, please consider getting it on Steam. It is still quite early in development but the more feedback I get now, the better the final game will be!

Join the official Squillamorph Discord server here: 
- Discord Server
​
​Follow Squillamorph on:
- Twitter
- Instagram
- Facebook
​
Tell your friends to check out the game too!

Hello everyone! I hope you all enjoyed the festive season and are having a good start to the year. I updated the game a little over a week ago, to remove the festive hats and make a dramatic performance improvement!
Today's post will cover this improvement.

Over the holidays, I discovered the main source of the game's performance issues. I had a hunch as to what it could be after I posted the last update, which did not improve performance much despite my best efforts. Turns out, I had been improving performance for the CPU and hadn't considered performance on the GPU; Unity does not display GPU information by default in its Profiler. After a quick test on my old laptop, running the game at different resolutions, I realised that the main performance issues were down to the graphics. 

I suspected that it might be the second camera I use to create the metaballs effect for the player character, which takes up a small chunk of performance on the CPU. The effect uses a secondary camera to render a particle system to a Unity render texture. The camera has a blur effect on it which blends the particles together. A shader on the output texture then 'clips' the texture opacity and changes the colour so the final effect appears solid.

I believed that either the camera or the render texture was causing the issues. However, it was in fact the blur effect on the camera that was to blame. To achieve the level of blur I needed, I was using Unity's depth of field post process effect. To be honest, I should have realised that this was causing the issues as I had problems with the same effect in an old university project. Now I felt worried because the only way to fix this is to remove the blur effect, which means I have to use art assets that are already blurred if I want to keep the metaballs effect.

Determined to improve the performance, I set about taking all of the sprites I use for the metaballs effect and began blurring them in Photoshop. It took a lot of tweaking and time to get it to a similar state as the depth of field blur. I also had to find a way to deal with the particles changing size, which now changes the size of the blur effect. This has a dramatic effect on the final metaballs appearance so I spent the most time getting this right. It was definitely worth the effort though. See if you can spot the differences in the GIF. The performance boost it gives is dramatic and I now need to test the game on a system older than my laptop! 

That's it for this post. I hope that wasn't too confusing, and that you are excited about the progress I'm making! I'm going to be working on more content for the game now that I've made such a jump on the optimisation side of things.

If you like the look of the game, please consider getting it on Steam. It is still quite early in development but the more feedback I get now, the better the final game will be!
​
I hope you enjoyed today's post! ​Thanks for reading!

Join the official Squillamorph Discord server here: 
- Discord Server
​Follow Squillamorph on:
- Twitter
- Instagram
- Facebook
Tell your friends to check out the game too!