Sorry for being quiet ! I’ve been coping with “real life” issues and also had a case of the sads so I got out of the habit of posting long-form updates. I have been working this entire time though, and updating you on everything new might take an entire afternoon. So instead, you’ll just have to play it for yourself a bit after 4.5 comes out 
It’s great to hear from you again, SF! I had been wondering how things were going, but didn’t want to be a bother.
So, getting ready for release? I can’t wait. 
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It’s great to hear from you again, SF! I had been wondering how things were going, but didn’t want to be a bother.
So, getting ready for release? I can’t wait.
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Never a bother! I’m still a nobody so it’s not like my inbox is ever swamped and when I’m absent I’m often just too shy/underconfident/folded over in pain to write something meaningful. If I only have the mental stamina for one thing on the computer during the day I try to make it the actual work.
And yes!! All the things holding up release have been taken care of!
Namely these were:
I also have a much more solid roadmap for post-release and how the game will slowly grow into a “full” title alongside my other projects.
Actually this is making me realize I do have a lot more I want to talk about so perhaps I’ll post a big changelog here later this week that just doesn’t go into as fine detail as previous posts.
As always my Twitter remains an up-to-date news source if you can tolerate the *** jokes and making fun of gamergate.
I’m way too busy to make decent posts so I’m just going to barf out a bunch of screenshots and you can ask me questions about them if you want:
Beautifully vibrant screenshots as always. I particularly like the 10th from the bottom. Keep it up!
More screenshots that I don’t have time to explain right now!
Always great to see an update on your game. I totally understand about being busy. I have been finding it difficult to find much time to hang out on the forums lately.
So glad to see people are still interested! This project has gained enough positive feedback and snowballed so hard that I’m considering making this a “full” commercial release that I work on over the next several months, instead of switching gears to something new and having to mooch off my girlfriend for another year.
I’m going to try and post more bitesize updates with explanations again.
So recently I improved the rocket smoke (again). I forget why I decided to do this. At first I tried experimenting with a subsurface shading model:
This looked great! But it had several practical issues. The lights didn’t really pierce through the smoke from behind like I expected, and the individual sprite silhouettes were too well defined in motion for something that was supposed to look volumetric. It was also more expensive and didn’t add much hue that the BaseColor couldn’t more easily. The spherical particle normals looked excellent, but were a little too spherical, and clipped the sprite edges that extended past the sphere’s boundaries.
I tried going for a more abstract look with some emissive warmth:
This didn’t make for as pretty screenshots, but was much nicer in motion.
Eventually though I tried baking the normals ahead of time in Substance Designer. I blended the normal map for a sphere with a tiny bit of normals generated using the BaseColor as a heightmap, which resolved the spherical clipping. Add some black-body heat simulation to the emissive channel and we get the best of both worlds!
Yeah, great updates as usual!
Holy smoke trails, Batman! Those look really awesome.
Work’s still puttering along, big update coming soon. Here’s a 1440p wallpaper in the meanwhile in case you needed one:
Hey! I’m sorry I haven’t been around. I’ve been sad because of Gamers 
(in fact I panicked for 5 solid days about posting here before actually doing it) But I’ve been working! And I’m working toward that alpha release specifically, which keeps getting more and more impressive imho. The parkour movement and full UI is being worked on right now in particular, and the building generator is way better than the last you’ve seen of it. Exciting times ahead.
Oh and here’s a work in progress snippet of the level 2 music:
bee tee tubs @sfthewolf](https://twitter.com/sfthewolf) is now my personal account. Work stuff will be at @gameappmakerco](https://twitter.com/gameappmakerco) with a much higher signal to noise ratio.
Your broken glass effect breakdown was really helpful to me, so thanks a lot!
If you don’t mind explaining it, how did you manage to transition the effect in/out? I’m experimenting with something similar, but the effect is kind of jarring as it just pops in from nowhere.
