[devblog] Preview - meet Kuro & Lea, rackets and new court

by WongKit » Fri Aug 19, 2022 9:13 pm

Heya!

it has been a while since the last official news. If you thought that this project is dead... well I can't blame you ;)
I am happy to announce that Pixel Tennis is finally going to get anime style character models. The old existing placeholder pills will be replaced with Kuro (left) and Lea (right).

Pixel-Tennis-Preview-August-2022.jpg
Pixel-Tennis-Preview-August-2022.jpg (506.46 KiB) Viewed 2599 times

They are fully animated and support swapping different outfits and hair styles. There will be also a new isle/beach themed court with way greater detail than the existing basic and arena ones.
Oh.. and rackets! Do not ask me, why it took more than 4 years for a tennis game to implement rackets :?

The previous updates mainly focused on gameplay and technical stuff. Visuals and everything related to 3D modeling were neglected across the board because of its complexity combined with my lack of knowledge. Outsourcing this task did not work that well, so I crash coursed into Blender, meshes, vertexes vertices, UV mapping, rigging, weight painting, blend shapes, lightmaps, matcaps, normals, pbr, culling, lod, animations, shaders and donuts in the last 4 months and this is the result.

There is no release date yet, because I want to take more time for polishing and also tackle the following topics:
  • Add more equipment variations
  • Better visual effects for charging, hitting and running
  • Handle/convert old items that were purchased in the current version
  • Rebuild the UI for theme support
Pixel Tennis will return to time limited test runs once the update is live. In the mean time, you can subscribe to the progress topic or simply play the current version of the game!

As always, every feedback is welcome!

Pixel Tennis Progress

by WongKit » Thu Mar 16, 2023 7:03 pm

- Not released yet-

Visuals
Fixed court basic net shadow
Fixed court isle plant artifacts
Adjusted lightmap resolutions for ground objects

UI
Added workflow for new ui system
Rebuild main ui
Rebuild popup messages
Rebuild login menu
Rebuild settings menu
Rebuild custom progress bar logic
Rebuild character select menu
Rebuild character menu
Rebuild lobby menu
Rebuild room settings menu
Rebuild ui localization
Added more ui animations
Added custom ui scaling logic to better handle exotic screen aspect ratios
Added handling for phone's notch area (true fullscreen with some shifted menu elements)
Improved rendering of custom fonts
Added several workarounds for bugs and replacements for missing features of the new ui system x.x

Misc
Updated Unity version
Updated anime style shader
Added more framerate options