State of Project KW (17 June 2023)

Wow, it's hard to believe that week went so quickly.

Reading Kula levels

This week has certainly been productive. Thanks to some fantastic resources out there on the internet, I'm now able to read the map files from original PS1 game. This also means that the game can open any custom community levels made with the Kula Workshop Level Editor! Yeah, can you believe the modding community actually made tools to actually edit the PS1 CD files to add custom maps? That's insane and I am 100% here for it.

At first I based the loading on the same logic that this level editor uses - since it's open source - but frankly the code was terrible in every way. Stupid functions doing stupid things and there's no support for block/surface metadata (such as orientation of PlayerSpawn or any other element). But fortunately, thanks to SaturnKai on hackmd.io, I was able to implement a much better algorithm for reading levels, and would you believe the article was only published about 9 or 10 days ago? Talk about good timing. See the attached video for a demonstration of the level loading in action! It's very sweet.

Movement

Okay, we're still a ways from having a perfect jump, but it's **sort of** implemented. I spent this week completely overhauling the movement system to allow for jumping, while also not finishing the jump, but  at least this means I can teleport the player at will to any location on the map, and on any axis too. This will be useful for levels that spawn the player on anything other than the +Y surface of a block. Maybe this week? Who knows. Game dev is hard, man.

Assets

Listen, I'm a programmer not an artist. You probably noticed in the video that I'm using the original assets for now. This is purely for my own sanity, so I don't have to stare at white cubes on the default Unity skybox all the time. I do not ever plan to redistribute the original assets - they are not mine to give away. When the game is approaching release I'll be hiring an artist to remake everything. So please Game Design Sweden AB, please Sony... Let me have this for now.

And on that note, we have one last thing to talk about.

Monetisation

It was an incredibly tough decision, but I think ultimately the best move for me in this project is to release it for free. I originally wanted to sell the game to earn some money from this. But as it's a fan remaster, I can't in all good faith do that without explicit permission from the original creators and publishers. So, I'll be publishing the game on itch.io completely free of charge when the time comes for release. But by all means, please do not hesitate to donate and buy my a coffee (or if you'd rather, a ko-fi).