The Impossible Expectations

Nearly 5 months ago I posted about Gum Squad and its nearly impossible goals. Making a game for 10 years and ensuring it grows alongside you as an artist is also a nearly impossible goal. Every year I look around me and the games get more pretty, more stylized, built in less time, and somehow continue to get significantly more attention than anything I create. I spent some time reflecting on why that is... Maybe my game is boring? Maybe it's not pretty enough? This is where I begin my descent into shiny-thing purgatory.

Lights have subtle Perlin Noise

For too long the game has looked a tad too flat. This is a really cheap way to make all of your lights look more lively!

The jump animation look more like a leap now

Water edges, ripples, and displacement shader

What if I made the water as pretty as possible? Will that suddenly stir up the drive to  wishlist  my game from deep within the heart of an observer?

New title screen art

Every time I get better at pixel art, I immediately struggle to leave my previous work alone. The main menu was worthy of a rework since it's one of the first impressions someone gets of the game.

Oh, you want to see what the full animation looks like? Fortunately, you can play the demo on Steam and see it right now.

Edges of fluids are brighter and therefor prettier

For a while now people have struggled with the visibility of fluids on the ground. this makes them pretty and easier to see.

Decal system upgrade

There used to be a max limit of 10,000 decal per level and a huge performance drop when creating many at once. Now we get no performance drop even when creating hundreds per frame and there is a max limit of 50,000 decals per level. In most playthroughs the most you will ever see is about 500 so this is almost certainly overkill.

Uncapping the framerate (Delta Time) and modifying the runtime

This is the absolute hardest thing I have ever done. My game relies on Game Maker's particle system, box 2D physics, and a few alarms. At this point, most people would tell me to roll my own systems for these or forget about delta-time however I made a discovery recently.

I was speaking to my friend (TabularElf) and found out that my Enterprise license for Game Maker meant that I have access to the runtime itself. I popped it open in Visual Studio 2022 (because for some reason I can't get it to compile in newer versions) and started tearing things apart. I removed most of the alarms, deleted timelines completely, and well that was only the beginning.

Now box2d and the particle system supports delta-time. The real hassle that comes with this is that if I want to export to other platforms, I will have to port these runtime changes to those runtimes individually. Not really thrilled with that but I think it'll be managable and for the time being I'm only supporting Windows/Proton.

Another huge discovery I made thanks to TabularElf is that you can call custom C++ functions via methods in GML. This means the grass and many other CPU heavy functions are now running a native C++ function written as an alternative solution to relying on the YYC export. Of course I've kept fallback GML functions around in case I fail to port something across to another platform.

Conclusions

There are tons of other new changes such as the ability to play violin (in the game) and throw people (again, in the game). This blog is something that I hold off on because writing about the things that I care about does not come naturally to me. I'd highly recommend you check out the demo for yourself and see what you think! To make it extra easy for you I offer you this nifty URL: steam://install/4507070

Copy-paste that URL into your browser and it'll prompt you to install the demo. Easy as that.

Well thank you for reading as always!