Hello there,

Welcome to the April update! What’s new this month?

Ocean Gameplay

I’ve been working on the ocean gameplay and now, the waves have a real influence on the gameplay! The turtle can move up and down waves and I have also added the ability to jump. This makes the controls more inline with the character and feels pretty cool. Additionally, there are crates floating in the ocean that we can destroy to get bonuses.

It wasn’t an easy task to set up, as I had to rewrite all the water detection code to make it compliant with the physics engine. So now, the water code is computed in CPU for collision and GPU for rendering, and the two versions must behave exactly the same. It was also challenging to set up real-time NON-PLANAR reflection (due to waves).

Here’s a video of the latest version of the ocean gameplay:

If you can’t see the video above, check it out here: https://youtu.be/_NXH5laQU-M

Non-Playable Characters

I have worked on a few NPCs, including 3D models, texturing, animation, and 2D avatars for dialogues. Here are a few screenshots:

Work in progress, of course; there are still many other ones to work on.

New Dojo Selection Screen

I spent some time designing a more interesting dojo selection screen. One big problem in my game was that the player collected gems but without really knowing why. Now, the first time the player enters a dojo, she can get a glimpse of what’s coming up and how much it’s going to cost. This gives good motivation to collect gems (but there are other cool things to buy, of course).

Sound Design

I finally started to work seriously on sound design, beginning with the main character. Now, there are sounds for footsteps, jump, roll, attack, landing, slide, and climbing. There are subtle variations (pitch, volume, audio source) on each occurrence to not annoy the player on the long run.

Communication

I’ve entered a few more festival selections in order to showcase the game on Steam. Sadly, I had quite a few rejections (as for now, I’ve applied to 15 festivals and was only accepted to 1). It’s kind of hard for motivation, but I’ll keep applying. Luckily, what I’ve been sharing on Reddit had some great traction and feedback until now, as you can see here:

¡Hola a todas y todos! Les comparto un fragmento del juego PC en el que estoy trabajando: "Zefyr: A Thief's Melody". Se puede navegar en tortuga por el océano. Está inspirado en Zelda Windwaker. En este momento, estoy tratando de mejorar esta parte del juego. ¡Espero que les guste!
byu/OneiricWorlds inVideojuegosMX

J'essaie d'améliorer le rendu de l'océan dans mon jeu d'aventure "Zefyr: A Thief's Melody". J'ai rajouté des vagues et de l'écume en essayant de rendre les répétitions pas trop visibles. C'est une vraie galère au niveau de la pile de rendu et c'est pas fini encore, mais j'espère que ça vous plaira!
byu/OneiricWorlds injeuxvideo

https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/128g1sq/update_of_the_ocean_big_3d_waves_geometrical_foam/

This is cheering me up 🙂

And yes, I try to post in English, French, and Spanish. Not that easy…

I’ve also shared a (French) tutorial video about how I coded the translation system in my games, and you can check it out on my YouTube channel here:

If you don’t see the video above, check it out here: https://youtu.be/CU015hL9mUk

Fixes & Improvements

As usual, I’m still improving puzzles, fixing bugs here and there, and reworking on code structure, factorizing, and removing useless dependencies.

And that’s it for this month!

As always, thanks a lot for your interest and support!

Peace 🙂