And I'll reiterate, no matter how much I get delayed by college, Grabbus remains AI-free!!! No point in the process involves any input from a computerbrain. Real code and art only!

Status update: Things going well! Homework is still taking up a lot of my time, but I'm still trying to get a moment to finish up the rest of those plants for the world map. At least I'm making all A's and keeping up with my studies!

Why be a gummillionaire when you could be a grabbillionaire?!

Tonight's new plants!! 5 more to go!

Got into college! But don't worry, it's just a couple classes to start with. I still have plenty of time for drawing plants, and adding other bits of content too! I'm excited about the next few items on my to-do list after the plants are all drawn... Just letting you know development is still on!

Also just got around to properly testing the new spatial hash formula used by the infinite grid data, found plenty of collisions, so I'm switching to a better, maybe even faster formula! Now it has no hash collisions within a generous range around the origin! Bitwise operators can be useful...

Tonight I'll be marathon-ing as many of these plants as I can! Each one has five variations, so it takes a second. I've also written down names and lore for each plant as I go, gonna organize that into a section of my design docs.

I've been trying out Unicorn Overlord. I may have to steal some of this!

New mushrooms! Half of the biomes now have their "foliage" sprites done! They aren't very hard to make, so it shouldn't be much longer that I can finish these and move on with the to-do list.

Immediate to-do list: -Finish drawing plantlife for all map biomes -UI Backdrop for the build menu -When looting "pickup" type items, condense them with larger versions that are worth more, so that huge loot rewards dont cause a flood of items that slow down the game -First NPC, the Trader!

We did it! The angle vector lookup table for optimized map rotation WORKED! This optimization will appear with the next update, whenever that's ready... along with the other optimizations I did a few weeks ago to the "infinite data" fetching. Welcome us to the 60 FPS club! 🏅

Today I'll be working on more plants! A nice relaxing drawing session would be... nice right now...

Today, I'm adding support for font switching for other languages. Shouldn't take too much effort, in fact I'm already pretty much done adding it. It turned out to be a simpler thing than I assumed. Just need to source some good fonts. But more exciting, a Russian translation file is now on the way!

Great success! The profiler reveals that with the new array optimization, the game is 5-10% faster now than BEFORE the new lighting was even added. Applause is most welcomed!

I'll try switching from using a queue to an array for the lighting mask, it should eke out a good amount more performance. Every drop of FPS I can get!

I did it! A new selective lighting layer that allows buildings and other things to glow at night! And I got it running without *too much* of a performance hit. You may need to lower your map size by one or two notches, but it works! This is gonna look so cool with more buildings...

Visiting Paris!!!

If you're an indie developer, you should hang this screenshot on your wall and use it as inspiration to never give up

Just managed a few things today! Got more building sprites! Added a lighting layer that allows buildings to erase shading over them in specific areas, to appear brighter at night To compensate for the performance hit, I did some extra optimization on GridMap data

A cool trick that has saved me a lot of UI dev time in Grabbus is the "time layer" concept built into the game's logic loop. I take direct control over what objects run their step code and when. Only objects matching the highest existing time layer value from ALL objects have their code run.

Coming soon... -Sylvia the Trader: Can be found in towers and will sell you random items or allow you to convert certain resources or currency into others for a markup. Duplidragon: Allows you to "favorite" a limited number of items by feeding them to him. Create copies for a fee.

Been meaning to do one of these!

With hard work and persistence, I now have this impossible-feeling opportunity to lift up others to make them a part of something significant. Each team member or contributor deserves a chance to shine - to be kidnapped into the creative world where they belong, if only for just a glorious moment.

Oh shoot, one thing I need to get on top of is adding new fonts for other languages. It is actually already possible to load a language file labelled for a variety of countries I built-in. The only thing missing is to have them switch to a new set of fonts, which will take some minor surgery.

A new little gif for the website!

www.Grabb.us Patch v0.2.4, the World Map Overhaul, has been released to the public! If you want a chance to provide feedback as the game improves, head on over to... store.steampowered.com/app/3516160/...

www.Grabb.us Patch v0.2.4, the World Map Overhaul, has been released to the public! If you want a chance to provide feedback as the game improves, head on over to... store.steampowered.com/app/3516160/...

Updated these buttons to be more translation-friendly with symbols and a tooltip rather than drawn-in text. Also made it more obvious that they are like "tabs" for switching modes.

The plants I'm drawing for the world map don't need detailed descriptions, but they are getting it anyway! I'm coming up with biology for each plant that will help establish how nature in Skixx works. Once I add the Skixx Codex to the game, you'll be able to find info like this inside!

I think Grabbus' top math challenge was making its world generator work on each combination of positive and negative coordinate axes. That was legitimately a pain in the butt that had implications everywhere else in the code. Glad it's solved!

I could release this update any time, but I really want more foliage on there... I'll see what I can do today!

Before and After

Got tons done today, and will do more tomorrow! Put the finishing touches on the sky effects. Existing building sprites have been realigned but new ones will be made later. Work on new biome-specific foliage is now underway! This update will be ready soon - once polished to my satisfaction...

Having an extra big Grabbus day tomorrow to see how far I can get to releasing the next update. Still plenty to do, but with the new map tiles and sky effect mostly done, we are well past the middle point on the map overhaul.

I've made great progress with the new sky effect! Surprised myself so much with how well it turned out, that I'm going to wait to show it till I get all of the cloud layers done, but it already looks really cool!! It is now possible to avoid seeing the pop-in of the world map tiles!

Been a busy week, now sitting down to draw some nice clouds for Grabbus

Got more work done on the new sky effect last night. As a bonus, I made it so the world map resets itself if you change options that affect its size or alignment! (Helpful for making sure the sky adjusts itself correctly at all sizes!)

Pulled a late-night dev session! Made good progress on the new sky effect, just need to adjust its sizing and give it a fun texture! Also found and ironed out the last of the issues with map rotation math. It's now perfected down to the pixel! Real, real smooth.

Last night I finally got around to fixing some jank in the world map's rotation code that would cause it to shift awkwardly as it spun past certain angles. Now it's much smoother! To showcase it (test it) I've also added a slow-spinning "attract mode" if you let go of the controls for awhile.

Waterfalls!

Here's some video of the new biome tiles and today's water animation changes! #indiedev #gamedev

Tonight, I'll be animating the water tiles. Wonder what I'll come up with...

Figured I'd post a little status update on here! I'm nearly done with the new terrain tiles for the world map overhaul... This was a major undertaking, adding 16 new biomes to the endless world of Skixx! Here are some example screenshots of how it looks so far! (The trees will get replaced!)

Still working on the world map graphics overhaul! I've made steady progress, but it still needs more time to reach the vision.

A bit of a side-quest today! The introduction of sixteen new overworld biomes for the world map overhaul makes it possible to expand on my initial ideas for building. I'm taking some time today to write down those new ideas and refine the existing design plan as it relates to building in Grabbus.

some spots opened up recently, send me a message if you're interested! and please share, it helps me out a lot

Got a couple more sets of rough terrain sprites done! Six more! Then I have to animate the water, remake the existing buildings and POI, and then add sets of vegetation, boulders, and other biome-specific deco.

Also there's some discourse going around about being a solo-dev. Grabbus, at a certain point, was just me putting together code and pixels and seeing what I could experiment with. Now there are people depending on me to finish what I've started so as not to waste their contributions!

I'll say this, the "Before and After" shots for the new worldmap graphics will be quite the contrast. This is definitely gearing-up to become the most beautiful part of Grabbus so far. But make no mistake, I have actual gameplay improvements on the docket too!

Status update! I'm still working on the new world map tiles, there are still a number of the rough terrain sprites, new vegetation and resizing of the existing buildings. It's a time-consuming thing since this is an art-heavy improvement, so I appreciate your patience as I get through it!