New Year, New Update

It's been 249 days since the last (and only) devlog, which is not a great statistic. But I am happy to announce new builds of BATTY VAMPS have been uploaded with some pretty cool updates.

Art And Music

First and foremost, I've finally gotten the amazing models Tomo made me into the game. Check them out in action on the cover image!

Batty Vamps is finally cute again.

Along with this new art comes new music. I wrote and produced a song unrelated to gamedev, and after finishing decided it would be nice to finally have some of my original music in BATTY VAMPS. So I tossed it in the background and it works well enough for now. If you're so interested, the original with vocals is here: https://on.soundcloud.com/zCdXC.

Batty Engine

For a while I've been wanting to do a refactor of the BATTY VAMPS codebase to separate the 'engine' code from the 'game' code. I'm happy to report that the refactor is done and BATTY ENGINE now exists as a separate reusable project from the BATTY VAMPS game. You can check it out at https://github.com/dontpanic5/BattyEngine. I open sourced it under the MIT license and anyone is welcome to use it under those terms, but I don't expect it to be useful to anyone but me (I'd actually discourage anyone else from trying to use it since no effort has been put into it being approachable). This is mostly something I've wanted to do so that if I want to make a jam game, a prototype, a side project (oh no), or any new game, I can do so by building off this project. It contains all the general purpose stuff I've built for BATTY VAMPS like basic UI (very basic), controls bindings, fixed update and render loops, polymorphic classes for game entities and environmental objects, etc.

What's Next?

I wanted to get this devlog out now before /agdg/ Demo Day 54 so I can feel like I tied up all my loose ends before the fun starts. After those festivities wrap up, I'm considering implementing a real UI framework in Batty Engine, so I can present settings to the player such as inverting the Y axis in controls, displaying FPS on screen, and whatever else. And y'know, real buttons would be nice. There are also big improvements I should make to Batty's flapping, making it easier to use and look better.

But overall, my white whale has been and still is the shader work I need to tackle. Smaller stuff like lighting and fog are important, but the whitest of all white whales is my need to move 3D model animation computation to the GPU. I cannot move forward with the gameplay of BATTY VAMPS until I can fix this performance bottleneck. It's my mission to knock this out at some point this year. You'd think that'd be enough time, but we are 249 days removed from the last devlog and it was a problem then...

If you actually read this far - you actually read this far? - thanks for checking it out, hope you like the game. We're all gonna make it, but don't let other people define what "making it" is for you. Be true to yourself and find your passion and treat yourself right! Whether it's a hobby or a jobby, the passion will always burn.