My primary goal for today was getting a copy of Pirate Island uploaded to the Steamworks page, and I wound up doing this first thing. I’m now able to use Steam to download the game back to my production machine. Then, over the course of some testing what the end-player will see, I discovered a handful of issues that required immediate attention.
Some of these things were cosmetic. There were some trees that were simply not billboarding right, and I ultimately scrapped all of the pre-existing trees in the setting and created new ones from scratch using SpeedTree. It helped that this month’s subscription ‘freebies’ were trees I had been wanting to add to the game, but didn’t have the funds for. A decent chunk of the afternoon went into that and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
There were some glitches that came about with the Steamworks integration, and a new problem developed where the controllers would not register button presses when loading up the actual game-stage. It took a little luck to piece together what was going on, but I’m now happy to report that the controllers work and I have set up a very rudimentary achievement system and stat system that will be getting greater focus fairly soon.
The Aquatic life that I was mulling over with and tried to implement yesterday got a bit of tweaking, and the fish look good too.
And the real nice thing about this being on the Steam system, even though I’ve not published it yet… I can now take screenshots of the game in progress. Not as useful as video of course, but I think I got some decent scenery shots to show off what the actual game play looks like.
Just a couple scenery shots of different parts of the island. I’m really enjoying how all of this is taking shape.
I’m going to need to sit down and come up with the to-do list for after submitting the game as “Early Access” so I can get feedback from potential players. The key things are going to be graphics-based (I don’t have a render pipeline set up yet, and that’s the whole reason the project is now being done in 2019.3) and I also need to significantly improve overall load/performance. Multiplayer is on the list, and I’m going to try my best to implement this feature, but I am not making promises just yet. There are a couple other odds and ends, including new Achievements, that I need to hammer out as well.
Hope that all of you are doing well. Can’t wait to give you all my next update!