Happy super-late New Year everyone!

So much for my wishing to post more devlogs more often

Before I begin, I wanted to say that even though a lot of people have found RED: Shadow Maggots through Youtube, because of Youtube’s storied history of working against their userbase (removing dislikes being the most recent example), I’ll slowly be moving away from Youtube and towards other alternatives. The first that I’m trying out is Odysee, which I chose specifically because it looks easy to use and I can embed Odysee videos right into this devlog (scroll down and see). For the same reasons, I’ll also be considering Rumble and Utreon (if they ever open their beta program).

I’ll still be uploading Maggot Showcase videos to Youtube, but said showcase videos and any update clips I post on Twitter will be posted to Odysee as well.

In any case, here’s everything that’s been going on in these last few months!

Cool, Visible Updates

Revolver Pyro

The Revolver Pyro character is nearing completion! His Super Critical animation took the longest to make (brainstorming isn’t easy) but he’s almost ready to be showcased. His Super Critical move has him summoning the skeleton arms hiding in his coffin and gives him multiple offensive buffs as well. All he’s missing now is some polish work on his animations and some sound effects.

Doors and Damage-Over-Time

The Wazowski doors will be featured as a damage-over-time mechanic! Poison and burn damage is ubiquitous in games, but when you think about it, they’re all the same! Why not make it funnier?

Doors will be status effect in the form of a-flying-door-hitting-your-face that deals damage to the affected character every turn. Not much by itself, but you better believe that there are plans to have other status effects that synergize with Doors such as

• Increasing crit rate when attacking Doored characters
• Increasing damage dealt by Door

Crit Effects

There have been a few people requesting that the classic critical hit glow effect be added. I’ve put it off for a bit in favor of other things, but I finally got around to adding it in. It’s a surprisingly simple effect to port over (a crit spark texture + an emissive material), but I still had to recreate it manually by studying the effect in TF2.

Less Cool, Less Visible Updates

Combat

• The combat line showing who the enemy will attack next will no longer be always visible. It will instead only appear when an enemy is going to use a Super Critical attack. This way, battles won’t always be predictable while critical hits won’t be completely random.

Skill System

• Skills that apply effects per turn are now applied together (ie. 3 effects that heal 300hp per turn will now give you 900hp at once rather than being applied separately)
• Enemies can now use skills on you. Still working out the gameplay ramifications (how often they use skills, will enemy skills go on cooldown, complex AI???)

UI

• Character UI (name, health etc.) now always faces the camera as opposed to being tied to the world

Misc

• The perfect block feedback sound is finally at a good spot! Give it a listen in the next Maggot Showcase video!

TF2Ls for Unity

The 72hr TF2Maps Content Jam happened on the 17th of December. It’s an event where everyone makes something TF2 related within 72 hours. The original RED: Shadow Maggots prototype was created during their event in 2020! I wanted to give back to the community this time around, and with my 72 hours, I worked on TF2Ls for Unity, a Unity editor tool whose purpose is to streamline the use of TF2 (and maybe other Valve) assets in the Unity engine.

This toolset is also a polished and more friendly version of the tools I use for RED: Shadow Maggots, so putting this together will hopefully go on to make the development of RED: Shadow Maggots easier!

If you’re a Unity developer (active or aspiring) and you want to give this tool a try, you can download it here!

What’s Next?

• A new maggot showcase video featuring the Revolver Pyro (name pending)
• More fleshed out gameplay in preparation for a demo release

That’s all for dev updates, I’ll now be answering some of your burning questions with some long-form answers!

FAQ

Why all the silence?

RED: Shadow Maggots is a hobby project that is worked on in the spare time of a very small team. I (Brogrammist) contribute the most work to it and distribute work to other members of the R:SM team whenever possible. None of us can work on this full-time without a way to put food on the table and we’re not comfortable with receiving donations for our work (although this may change after Valve concludes their discussions with the TF2 modding community).

I have a full-time job, a family to be with, and friendships to maintain, which means I have to be very selective about what I do with the time I allocate to RED: Shadow Maggots. As with all game developers, we end up sacrificing progress updates in favor of actually working on the game in a misguided attempt to “push things out sooner”. I’ll make more of an effort to improve, especially if it means I can avoid typing out such long catch-up posts like these.

Aside from all that, my poor computer habits have recently brought some repetitive-strain injury in my fingers and it’s really impacted my ability to work in general. For the past few months, I’ve struggled to get any amount of work done since much of my life revolves around the use of my hands. After resting over the holidays and getting some compression gloves, I’m now at least able to get back to writing code and somewhat long-form text.

If you’re reading this, PLEASE, HEED MY WARNING! Avoid going on long gaming/work sessions!!! Take a break every 20 minutes! Stand up, stretch, look away from your screen, just for 100 seconds at the very least! I’m not even 25 and I can’t even go about my day without worrying about my thumbs anymore!!!

Can non-Twitter users get more updates too?

Twitter updates are a lot easier to make compared to Youtube videos and Itch devlogs. This is primarily because the standards for a tweet are much lower, and because of that, it takes much less time to pump out a Twitter update. As much as I dislike Youtube’s way of doing things, most of RED: Shadow Maggots followers are on Youtube, and I’d rather not spam low-effort videos on my channel.

As a decent balance between ease-of-creation and quality, I’ll make an effort to mirror all my short Twitter clips to a Youtube alternative and then embed them in a brief Itch devlog.

Do also note that there have been and will probably continue to be stretches of time where I don’t post anything to Twitter or anywhere else, primarily because I have nothing interesting to post. This is usually because the things being worked on aren’t particularly visible (code/sounds etc.)

Is R:SM any closer to coming out?

Yes, but actually no. As excitement for the project increases, expectations for it increases as well, and with it, the project’s scope. The gameplay demo that I previously promised for 2021 is starting to feel difficult to deliver for before the latter half of 2022.

The full game itself is definitely going to take several years to release with everything planned for it, and I’ll have to ask that you take my word for it when I say that I’ll see it to the end. If I ever choose to abandon the project, I promise that I’ll release all the source code and whatever is playable online for everyone to use.

Sorry again for keeping you waiting! Thanks for supporting us throughout 2021 and we hope you stick around for 2022!