Post-jam update + things missing in the commentary

Hello! Making a videogame while being a full-time student is no joke. I loaded up my schedule with some extra spicy computer magic this time, too, so I thought I wouldn't have time to update this game. But a couple small fixes here and there really help.

1. Controls can now be customized from the tutorial screen. One profile is kept for keyboard and controller.

2. Minimal controller support added.

3. Roach now controls better on moving platforms.

4. Roach no longer clips through waterslides.

There's lots of stuff I didn't have time to talk about for the jam project. This was meant to be a final sendoff for this project, but here's some things I didn't get around to.

Things I wish I got around to:

RoachFriends

I wasn't able to port the demo to the version of Godot that I was working with for this project, but older versions of RoachGame had npcs moving on the same logic as the player character. This meant that npcs could climb walls and follow you. I had an surprisingly smart approach to the pathfinding, where instead of using some complicated solver to get npcs to climb towards you, they simply aimed for a position in the world constantly orbiting around the player. This added "error" made them surprisingly resilient to unpredictable terrain. Since their true target was constantly changing, they naturally tried multiple things to get unstuck, and since the wall climbing logic is extremely flexible, they usually found something by pure chance. The way to get them stuck reliably was to get them to follow you onto a wide ceiling, then jump onto a floor below, leaving them circling your position on the ceiling forever.

The circling behavior also made them have a similar energy to excited dogs, which is always good.

Besides porting issues, visualizing the orbit was difficult. The orbit code was one of the stinkier pieces of script I had written for the project in its heyday.

3D scanning

One thing I got a lot closer to including in the project was a story about how me and my friends found a 3D scanning app and were able to scan some real life objects into the game. These had become a staple of the test level for me, so I really wanted to include them. But, it turns out the scans were using *really* high resolution geometry. I tried and tried, but nothing I could do could fit the scans into an export small enough to get around itch.io's size limit for individual files. Eventually, I compressed the meshes in Blender, but that corrupted the UVs (that's the way the 2D texture aligns with the 3d model. If you mess it up, the whole model looks unintelligible), and I compressed the textures in Godot, but that did all sorts of bad things to them. 

Looking back, I probably could have done it if I wasn't rushing- compress the mesh in a way that preserves uvs and compress the texture outside of Godot's import window -but it was hard to keep a clear head. I had already recorded lines talking about the story, and didn't notice the issue until I ran test exports about halfway through the jam. So, I hurried, and ended up corrupting the scans.

Concept Art Gallery

There is a lot of concept art for the different areas and characters I wanted to be in the game. I meant to have a gallery for them in the developer commentary. The main issue with this idea was that the concept art is completely bonkers! I drew it myself and I can't make heads or tails of most of it. Big "came to me in a dream" energy. The most cohesive, and most ambitious, is this one here for a level that takes place on the backs of a moving flock of birds.

Even here, the notes a little vague and self-contradictory. At one point I say the flock is supposed to have boid physics and in another I say they're supposed to be static. The core progression is that you stick a bed to a bird's head to get into their dreams and steal the power to control birds. I've been told my games have a.. peculiar sensibility to them.

itch is rabidly objecting the act of me uploading this second image. Maybe that's for the best? Here's how the idea goes:

To me, one of the funniest video games was, and still is, Desert Bus. It's so.. raw. There's no point to it. You literally just drive a bus through the desert for 8 hours. I first found out about the game from Games Done Quick. It's such a stupid concept that there is at least one actual "speedrun" of the original game. The real comedic potential for me is putting desert bus in other video games- the realization on the player's part that that they are now in Desert Bus, and that they are now wasting their time. I think I actually had this idea before seeing it in the wild, but for whatever reason, InfernoPlus' Desert Hog map for Halo, and the integration of a similar idea into his Halo Cursed Edition mod, spoke to me at a profound level. 

The genius part is, Desert Hog is not a boring map. Not at all. Inferno dotted it with cursed warthogs, vehicles that the player could use. Each one was a spin on the classic warthog, ranging in size, number of wheels, number of seats, number of turrets, gravitational orientation, and other aspects. So, while there are stretches of just driving, they are broken up by funny warthogs appearing over the horizon, and the player cautiously approaching them to see if they're just deathtraps or actually useful. Of course, RoachGame had to have a level like that. The twist was that you wouldn't be able to beat it in a fun amount of time until you found a "GearShifter" ability somewhere else in the world. Once equipped with that, you could shift to higher gears to move faster, making the trip across the desert more human.

Thank you for playing my game!

I'm currently writing this while slacking off on homework. This should be the last update to this project. I'm currently working on my next project. The estimated development time is quickly reaching the ballpark of years. So I'll try to make a simpler demo just for this winter. Maybe new years is a good deadline?