Steam Beta, Dynamic Shadow Distances, Misc News

If you check the Pawperty Damage Discord server, you may have seen this already: On Steam there is now a beta branch, which you can check out to play/test the latest unreleased version of the game!

Steam Beta

The beta version adds the new high score and leader boards feature, dynamic shadow distances (as described below), and a bunch of fixes—for more detailed changelogs, please check the Discord server!

To play the beta version of the game, you need to switch the game to the beta branch. To do this...

• Go to the game's "Properties"
• Select the "Betas" tab
• Enter the following code: dB4I6i1fpw0t

As you can see, the beta branch is password protected: Please do not share this code!

I might change the password every now and then, but either way, hopefully there's never too much time between a beta version and its release to the public, anyway. This version, hopefully, will still release by the end of the month!

Please note: At the moment the beta version is Windows only, unfortunately. For future version I'll hopefully upload Linux and macOS builds as well!

Skin Pack DLC Keys

With the next update of the game I will also release a free DLC that adds the new character skins I have been working on previously.

While free, the DLC is not publicly available yet, so if you want to try them out beforehand with the beta version (and they'll only work with the beta version, at the moment), feel free to request a Steam key to unlock the DLC: Just send me a message here on Patreon, or via the #key-requests channel in the Discord server. (Just mention it's for the skins DLC, in particular!)

Dynamic Shadow Distance

One of the improvements to the game that's currently in beta, is using a dynamic shadow distance to improve the visible range of shadows:

Before and after: Shadow rendering no longer cuts off half-way across town.

The game uses shadow cascades to improve the visual quality of shadows. Essentially, shadows that are closer to the camera are rendered at a higher resolution than shadows that are far away from the camera.

Before, the shadow distance was set to 60 units, so beyond that no shadows would get rendered. However, shadows that would be much closer than that would be rendered at a particularly high quality: Which is important, because the characters can start out fairly small and have the camera pretty close to the ground, making the shadow quality very noticeable.

When the character got very big and the camera started to overlook the whole town, you could easily see beyond a range of 60 units, however... And see there were no shadows beyond that range. That was the trade-off.

Left: Shadow distance at 60 units, right: shadow distance at 250 units

So just increasing the shadow distance means reducing the shadow quality, overall: You are rendering a larger surface area with the same shadow resolution, losing detail along the way.

To solve this, I'm changing the shadow distance on the fly now, based on the player camera' height: High camera position means high shadow distance, low camera position means low shadow distance.

When the camera is far away from the ground, the blurrier shadows are not noticeable as much, and when the camera is very low you cannot see as far: The perfect compromise!

Making the shadow distance dynamic like this makes a lot of sense for a game that needs to work at so many different scales and sizes.

However, there is one downside to this technique: It only works for a single camera... If there were a second camera, it would render with the same shadow distance as the other one, and since the two cameras could be at different heights, things start to fall apart, a little. Which is to say, shadow rendering in split-screen games will work just like it did before, with a fixed shadow distance... Sad.

First-Person View

It's a very big GIF. Sorry about that.

Here's a bit of a silly, secret feature I have added with the new beta version: A first-person camera mode!

This feature has been requested a whole bunch of times, so I thought I'd at least give it a try... Much like I have expected, the result isn't all that great/playable (not without a whole lot of extra effort, anyway), so I decided to not implement the feature, officially.

If you still want to give this mess a try, however, you can type in the cheat code...

bethekaiju

...to switch to first-person view: Just start a game and type it in on your keyboard.

Sometime I should compile a list of all cheat codes, for patrons!

Misc News

Maybe you remember, I was trying to steal German tax payers' money by applying to a local indie dev funding program!

That didn't work out, unfortunately—apparently it was a close call, and I've gotten some great feedback out of it. So I'm not sad, at all, and will definitely try again, next year!

Instead, I'm happy I can focus working on Pawperty Damage, a little longer!

Also, this drastically increases the chances of there being a paid Pawperty Damage DLC, later this year, or so: Gotta hustle, somehow, haha!

And as always, thanks for your support!