Chapter 2 Update!

Redeemart 0.6 Patch Notes

A video breakdown of the update can be found here

Although given the amount of time that has passed since it's a little out of date.

Chapter 2 added

• New Weapon

• New Story Content

• New Gameplay modes, upgrades and Redeemosts

• New achievements

• Improved stability

• Moved to C++17, the game saw a minor performance improvement. Work is in place to move to C++20 but I would need to upgrade my library dependencies to do so

• Improved performance throughout the game. Especially, during shelf views unnecessary draw calls have been eliminated

• Improved load times due to optimizations in loading approaches

• Enabled particle variable transparency. This was an omission from the particle optimization process. Particles now have greater levels of variability and subtlety.

• Downsized depth of textures to increase performance and ease GPU memory usage. Currently, there is no explicit HDR support in Redeemart so there's no point in using larger image depths

• Resolved issues with random number generation (inclusive/exclusive issue). This should lead to sound effects that were previously being skipped over being played.

• Improvements in brick gameplay and brick AI behaviour

• Various bug fixes

Moving Forward

After this update, I've decided I'm going to change my approach to updates. This major update covered both technical changes and content changes. Which meant the whole game had to be retested. I think my new approach will be to provide minor technical updates before major content updates. In hopes of minimizing the amount of testing required.

That said, I'm currently planning 2-3 minor releases after this update with improvements such as:

• Brick rendering optimizations

• Shaders that better take advantage of individual hardware capabilities

• Improved mouse and keyboard support. This has become quite necessary with the latest chapter 2. Up until this point, I've kept all the controller and mouse and keyboard inputs unified but that approach is no longer viable. So I plan to have unique input handling for mouse and keyboard, however, this is a sizable change.

• The ability to buy new Redeemosts after dying. So if you're struggling on a particular wave you can upgrade your abilities

• Text batching for increased performance