Skins, lights, effects & build 0.6.3.1

Let there be light in Vibe City

We've been busy, opened up a bunch of systems at the same time and it took a bit longer to get all of them to the finish line. It didn't help that all three of us had work on other projects too, but such is life. We're happy it's done and we can hardly wait for our next playtest to get some feedback.

Build 0.6.3.1

• migrated to URP 2D

• new character customization options, picker & randomizer

• revamped all our old skins and added a bunch of new skins

• 2D lighting system

• atmospheric particles & fog

• camera movement update, lookahead and zoom based on player's speed

• toast notifications system

• revamped some of our shaders

• EMP effects and area updated

• revamped player particle systems (flame, trail, gboots, EMP)

• powerup UI update and integrated it with the toast notification

• rebalanced powerups

• new community quests

• dancing sprite lights sync better with the radio

• performance updates

• fixed A LOT of bugs

URP to URP 2D

This one was long overdue. We tried it in the past, but gave up on it since it broke some of our game. But now it's done and we have better shaders, 2D lights and a more suitable rendering pipeline for a 2D game. But the real reason behind the lighting update was to address some of the feedback we were getting about the character feeling like it was floating on top of the city canvas instead of being part of it. Some of our 'sprite lights' that sync with the beat of the radio station received a light component on top of it that affects players. Same goes for the police drones, jetpack, EMP or the powerup drones. On top of that, we replaced our sprite clouds with a three layer camera fog parallax that becomes denser with altitude. We also added some dust particles! For these two updates, big shoutout to SasquatchBGames, so many good tips on their youtube channel! Not only did I learn a lot for this update, but now have a bunch of other ideas for the future. Thank you sir, your work is priceless! And there's still work to be done here, I think we might update the entire city parallax at some point. We're happy with the street level, but there's more tinkering to be done the higher up you go, on both scene and background camera layer. It takes some time to learn the ropes, but we're getting there with every single update.

Character customization update

Redoing the rig and some of the animations didn't sound fun, but now we have a more robust system to skin our characters and adding new sets got so much easier. Until we decide to change the rig again - I hope not, but we might!

Another shoutout, to RustyStorm this time, not only did she update all of our old sets, but also added a lot of new ones. And there could be a few more in store here, now that we have this new standard. And I have my green-gold-black set now, ya mon!

Toast Notification System

We needed a place to display various events that happens in the game (eg. Pawn Shop OPEN) but we're also using it to announce when you get a buff (power-up) or debuff, showing name, icons and a short description. Our old buff/debuff system was a bit unclear, especially on controller/steamdeck. In the future we plan to hook into this system to also give tips and tricks and maybe some sort of