Level Select that I Wrote, and my Body is Smote

What is up people! It is far too late in the night (or early in the morning?) for me to be writing this, but as I suspect I will be sleepy and sluggish tomorrow morning, I figure I’ll get started while the brain is ticking! Let’s jump into the blog shall we?

As ever, I shall start with a Horde update. I have managed to be true to my word for once! Err, kind of. I professed to you all last blog that I was to start making full levels, then get a level select system in. Well, I’ve sort of flipped that in my head, and I’ve started with the latter. This is mostly because, with a background as a programmer, writing a level select system is something that comes way more naturally to me. The other reason is that I simply forgot my order of work!

That’s OK though, as it’s all still work that needs to be done! I spent a bunch of time playing around with a transition system that allows you to change hub worlds on the fly. Want to see it? Well, you can! Here’s a video of it in action:

As with this entire project so far, the art is very placeholder. I need to stop fretting about accounts and actually move on to hiring someone to make this game visually appealing. But that’s a conversation for another time.

For the more programmatically inclined of my readers, I decided that rather than keeping all of my hub pages loaded in the scene, and translating them into position using one big long offset, I would instead load exactly three hub pages at a time, discarding and loading hubs as you slide. It was a fun mental exercise, and I even played around with only having two loaded at a time, but decided that the risk of frame drop from loading and sluggish feeling controls was too great.

So is there any other news? Well, not really. We’ve had to start self-isolating in the #EgoHousehold so there’s been little for us to do but play videogames, and generally mooch about. Which we have being doing aplenty.

That being said, I’m currently undertaking a challenge! I am now at day 14 of the “100 push-ups a day, every day in May” challenge! This is something I’ve decided to take on for a couple of reasons. One, I have always had weak upper body strength, which has been a constant drag on my climbing skill and my parkour capabilities. I am hoping this exercise will help resolve that. And two, it’s for charity. I am running a fundraiser for Cancer Research UK, and this whole challenge is part of their drive to help people.

My secret shame is that until this month, I’ve never been able to do more than 10 reps, with poor technique. I’m delighted that after half a month, I can now do 40 with poor technique, or 20 with improving technique! That has been a real win for me!

Those who have been kind enough to donate have already smashed my £100 target, and I appreciate them so much! As a result, I have said that if we get to £150 I will post a video from each week, showing my pain, my lack of skill, and hopefully some improvement! If you want to get involved, check it out by clicking the image below!

I think that about covers it for this post. I’ll get back to doing push-ups shall I? In the meantime, look out for me on my personal streams on Twitch, or leave a comment here if you want to talk shop!

Matt out.