Games Devlog by Chris - Stones Throw Updates

Stones Throw Updates - Posted on: 10/8/2018 [StonesThrow]

I finished adding the new "water caustics" and "cloud shadows" effects to Stones Throw. It took a few days to update because I encountered several problems...

Upgrading Unity always causes weird problems. In this case, my "wet screen" fx were reversed... which is ironic, because I solved it by removing the code I originally added to prevent that problem.

The "retro" fx were burning into the screen, which had something to do with Unity's "bloom" fx - I changed the inspector order, and that fixed the problem.

The "cloud shadows' effect was unintentionally affecting the camera's "sun rays" effect. To solve that, I created a new layer named "Camera" and made the effect ignore all the cameras on that layer.

After making the updates, I realized I had updated the wrong project... I had published an update several months ago and when I copied the files to my new hard drive, I copied the wrong files... fortunately, they were backed up, so it wasn't a significant set-back.

For the Android version, I learned you can't use the built-in shader variable _Time, because it loses precision over time and that causes the textures to be distorted. And since it's not visible in the editor, it took hours to troubleshoot. My solution was to use the variable _SinTime instead. I made custom "mobile" versions of the shaders for that.

One time Unity froze while publishing, and I was scared to force-quit fearing it would corrupt the project, so I let it hang for a good 30min before finally killing the process. Thankfully, nothing was corrupted.

Not sure if all that work was worth it... but the new effects look nice!

This will probably be the last time I update the game. I can't imagine trying to upgrade it to the latest Unity version... I mean, I had lots of problems and this was only an upgrade from 5.3 to 5.6.

Check out the game on Itch: https://kreediddy.itch.io/stones-throw
Also available for patrons on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/links-to-full-5747237

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