Vecter News

I want to get back in the gamedev game, but right now I don't feel like talking much, so in very short here's what's happening:

• Retirement's over, I'm working on Vecter
  
• I'm not as chatty anymore, I'll be focusing more on coding and less on discord / social media
  
• I'm no longer taking input
  

I actually missed coding on Vecter, so I'm getting back to that, hopefully to help me disconnect from the world that's crumbling around me.

Okay so what am I actually doing:

Technical explanation: Vecter is running on the Legacy Rendering Pipeline in Unity which, is old and has become very restrictive when I want to do anything. It's one of the main reason I threw my toys out of the pram. So I'm basically deleting the whole graphics side of Vecter, every custom trick I did to make it work on PC and will be rebuilding the whole thing in Unity's Universal Render Pipeline (URP) complete with it's own custom shaders and such. Some visual features will be lost because I either don't like them anymore or can't be bothered to implement them, some will be added (because I think they look cool/better, but there will be some visual changes. That's what I'm focusing on right now.

Okay, now in English:

I'm ripping out the graphics and re-building them from zero in the hopes of making it better / faster / work on more devices



What I did not miss was talking to everyone. It became overwhelming to the point where I couldn't handle it anymore, and that's a real shame. Talking to EVERYONE made me discover some amazing friendships, friendships that lasted to this day (You know who you are) but it also created a massive tsunami of people wanting my attention. Not gonna lie, my overinflated ego enjoyed it for a while but it became incredibly overwhelming trying to keep up. It's not anyone in particular's fault, it's just gets tiring being on discord day in and out trying to keep up with the conversation.

So I'm not going to... sorry I guess. Might post more on twitter tho'? Or not... I dunno



I'm also going to be taking suggestions and ideas less. I'm most definitely not going to reply to them, and will probably not give any hints or roadmaps. For a long time Vecter no longer felt like Taranasus's Vecter, it felt more like "add all the features" Vecter, to me anyway, and that ain't cool. I was trying too hard to make something that other people liked but not necessarily that I liked. That's gonna change now and I hope you like what I make because if you don't, well it's a free game.

- The credits screen is now accessible again from the main menu. I forgot to add it in after remaking the menu system
- The "Who made dis?" achievement has been hooked up to the credits button so you get the achievement when looking at "ze credits"
- Fixed the "Keep Vecter Free" achievement

v 1.2.0.11

As I'm no longer actively working on the game, I thought it would be nice to do some cleanup and address a few things to just overall make it a nicer experience.

So towards that end I have:
- Made the city generation a little faster to lessen the performance impact
- Removed some online multiplayer code that never came to fruition but was slowing everyone down by just existing
- Updated to Unity 2021.1.3f

And, to make it fair, here are the patch notes for some previous versions that I may have forgotten to add on here before dramatically exiting:

v1.2.0.10

Fixed issue with score not uploading correctly for seed 5555555555

v1.2.0.9

Fixed a bug where it would cause the game to spam an error regarding Unity Event System

Hi Everyone,

Well, I knew this day would come eventually. Deep down I wish it never did, but reallity seldomly goes according to plan. It is a bit hard to write this, I find it a little bit sad to admit it to myself, but here it goes:

I'm retiring from game-dev.

I don't know if it's temporary or permanent, but right now the drive I used to feel that pushed me to work on Vecter every free moment of my time is no longer there. I didn't expect it to last this long, to be honest...

It's been 2 years almost to the day since I've started on this journey, and it all started with this Reddit post , and this gif:



It's been an amazing journey where I've made a lot of amazing friends, had a metric fucktone of fun and learned more about the gaming industry than I really ever wanted or intended to know...

As someone that made a free game just for the giggles, I never thought I'd get this far. Vecter has been downloaded over 335,000 times by 245,000 people worldwide. A quarter of a million people have looked at Vecter and thought "Yeah, this looks good enough to give it a spin". Then, even though they had no obligation to do so, 2321 people liked it SO MUCH that they decided it's worth leaving it a positive review. Another 741 thought it good enough to even throw in a steam donation, another 30-ish thought it so good that it deserves a Patreon donation and then another 40-or-so thought it worth a Ko-fi donation.

Vecter has been in the Escapist Magazine and on the Opera GX Game Corner and featured in so many YouTube videos that I've lost count with new videos being made about it still almost daily.

How I feel right now is a combination of pride, satisfaction and joy. It's a feeling of knowledge and understanding, a new level of insight into an industry fueled by passion, obsession, sleepless nights and sometimes even thankless efforts. So with that said I'd like to do a little thanking of my own:

Trisy - My wife - Thank you for supporting me in this. You were the one pushing me every day and challenging me to go forward and follow my drive. You've sacrificed a lot to this game just to see me smile, and it without your love and support I doubt this would have ever even left the prototype stage.

Roczo - My friend - Thank you for all your help with the community. It's hard managing people's feelings and expectations. It's hard deciding when someone is trying to be a troll or just doesn't know any better, and it's even harder doing all of that while also living with your own responsibilities. I doubt the Discord server would have been such a quality place without your guidance and support.

Sergiu - My partner in crime - Thank you for being my inspiration. Truth be told if it wasn't for you and Unbound, for your passion to succeed against the odds and make something truly beautiful and unique I probably would never have considered following my own again. You might think you've done nothing, but you've done more than you could ever imagine by just being yourself.

Pawelori - Thank you for keeping my perspective in check with your wildly disturbing artistic creations. You shared them with me and helped me keep my vision fresh by just being yourself. You probably didn't even know you were doing it, but you were, and for that I am grateful.

InsidiouSin, Dargonsight91, Hypersycos, Xi, Robo - Thank you for moderating discord and keeping the pace. Roczo and I deeply appreciate your assistance and through your fair and watchful eye, we have a server filled with fun and challenging discussions that all of us had something to learn from and helped us grow.

And finally you, the player, the reader of this text right here - thank you for trying out Vecter. I made this game selfishly for me because I wanted to, because I thought I had something to prove, but ultimately it was you I actually made it for because it was you that gave it life and purpose. The game itself is just endless lines of code running on your computer making pretty pictures but it is you, dear player, that transformed it into a living breathing experience and it is ultimately you that made all my late nights and early mornings of coding mean something.

And for that, I am endlessly grateful...

What happens now? Well, nothing really. Vecter will still be here, on steam, for you to enjoy. The leaderboard will remain open since it costs me something like $20/month to run which the donations are more than enough to cover the cost probably for the next 5 years. The discord server will stay open for as long as it's active and people find it a fun place to hang out. The only difference is I won't be pouring much time into development anymore.

I'll still be around to fix the occasional bug, help with the occasional support question, but honestly from this moment going forward, what you see is pretty much what you get.

Thanks for coming, thanks for reading, thanks for playing and glad you enjoyed it.

As for me... I'm finally enjoying playing other games again instead of obsessing over my own, and it feels really good. It feels liberating... I'll catch y'all on the flip side. Pace!

Yes I'm at it again. Hopefully I'm almost done but I like my games stable :D Most of the things I've been fixing are just overall stability and performance improvements that you won't necessarily see or be affected by on a day to day use, but they were clogging up my crash reports and I hate it when that happens.

Like seriously, when you se an error like "Cannot read file details of some_ripped_song.mp3.repack"... That ain't an MP3 now is it? So yeah just fixed various issues like that. But since I don't update steam as often as I update discord with release notes (Please join my discord
P.S. A friend and long-time player, writer of the main Vecter user guide and moderator on the Discord server Roczo is holding a small giveaway on his twitter account to let people know about his artsy skills. If you fancy yourself winning a commissioned portrait by our resident artist, check out his giveaway here: https://twitter.com/roczoo



[1.2.0.1]
- Fixed bug where pressing escape in the options menu would just exit the game completely
- Fixed spelling of bellow -> below

[1.2.0.2]
- FIXED: "link music to speed" doesn't seem to work with standard music" - The feature itself is not broken, the description in the menu was wrong. The volume + pitch of the song is linked to the bonus modifier in the game. The bigger your bonus modifier, the higher the volume and pitch. This is to create a sense of speed and urgency a-la Devil May Cry style. Yeah I unfortunately don't have the funds to make cool stuff like add lyrics on top or more instruments but hey, I tried okay?!
- FIXED: Donw -> Down
- FIXED: Usefull----->Useful
- FIXED: exiting the screen saver with esc closes the game - It doesn't anymore
- FIXED: exiting the screen saver with enter transfers the click to the underlying menu, resulting in e.g. the options being opened or a game being started
- FIXED: quitting a seed run via menu and then pressing the start menu results in the keyboard menu controls not working (is the focus still in the seed window on the go button?)
- FIXED: exiting the seed input with esc returns to the title, pressing play then shows the seed input field
- FIXED: using the keyboard, focus wraparound doesn't work in the ingame pause menu vertically while working horizontally (and in both ways everywhere else)
- FIXED: after exiting out of a seed run, the seed window breaks. pressing backspace closes the input window and you can't overwrite the number in the field anymore. the only way to clear the field I found in my 5 mins of testing was doing the following sequence until the field was clear: Start by having the input textfield focused, then do (backspace -> enter -> left -> right). after opening the menu with the field empty, press left->right and then you can enter another seed.

[1.2.0.3]
- Fixed a bug where mouse inputs on the menu were not registered in the bottom part of the screen

[1.2.0.4]
- Going through a bug-fixing phase. This release contains just code fixes like null reference exceptions and such to just get the game more stable. The next few releases will probably be the same to get the game more stable.

[1.2.0.5]
- Same as before, just trying to fix all the code gremlins

[1.2.0.6]
Fixed achievements:
"I don't like the colours"
"In a sharing mood"
"083112101101100068101109111110" (Speed Demon)

[1.2.0.7]
Fixed some more bugs in-code as reported by the automatic error reporting mechanism in-game. Just hoping to make the game more and more stable.

[1.2.0.8]
More of the same + updated to unity 2020.2.7f1