devlog 10

the other day I decided to wipe my laptop’s harddrive and completely eliminate Windows from my workflow. this nearly worked, but it took a lot of work, so I’ve been a little distracted.

nonetheless, I’m able to do work now.

level loading

I can’t escape it.

now that I’m developing on Linux, performance characteristics are a little different than what they were on Windows. it’s just a little annoying that the game runs slower in both Wine and the Ubuntu export. I’m not sure why, though in Wine I suspect it’s because API stuff is slower, and in native, it’s because graphics are slower. profiling hasn’t revealed much so far, so I suppose it is a later me problem.

to try and mitigate the new stutters, I decided to adjust the loader to load each layer over multiple frames, to hopefully reduce the load. this helped a little bit, but the game still has some bad stutters when loading rooms, so layer loading might not be the actual problem. later me problem.

graphics silliness

GameMaker compiles your glsl es shader code into whatever the compilation target’s favorite graphics api wants. or I should say it tries… it does well most of the time, but I ran into a silly issue way back while trying to pass a sampler2d into a shader. on Windows, GameMaker compiles things to the DirectX api, and it does it well right up until we touch explicit sampler2ds, because for whatever reason, my uvs were getting flipped vertically. in the shader, I fixed it by flipping the uvs again. I then never bothered to touch this code for years.

fast forward to a few days ago, for whatever reason, everything got flipped vertically in super strange ways when I compiled to Ubuntu. can you guess wh-

I was lucky that I didn’t need sampler2ds that much. I was able to fix it by removing my earlier fix and just flipping the texture I pass into the shader if the platform is Windows.

levels

two of my friends tested my game. I’m very happy with the results, and I feel like I understand what the levels need to look like just a little better. I’m also still feeling that fuzzy feeling, because they seemed to have actually liked the game, and I’m so so happy about it. now I have to finish this game so they can be happy ig. I think that’s how it works.

one problem, a lot of world 1’s later levels kinda suck, and they need a near complete redesign. specifically, they need to be longer and more organized. none of the levels are like this.

since I’m nearly done with world 1, I’m thinking I could get started on world 2’s design to get a feel on how the levels should feel. after I’ve done some of that, I’ll come back to world 1 and use what I’ve learned to fix things.

that’s the plan anyways. we’ll see.

god i wish i wasnt using gamemaker