This month, I experienced the pure pain of DeltaTime. Along with not having as much time to work on Slugger during May, DeltaTime was mainly the only thing I managed to implement.

The reason I even implemented it in the first place was because when the FPS in a game drops, the game slows down with it. But with DeltaTime, things happen in the game depending on time, not on frames. So when the FPS drops, you won’t notice it as much and it might only become slightly more choppy instead. You could even run it at higher framerates, for less latency. One great thing I can now do as well with the game is I can implement slow-motion effects. At the moment, the game simply slows down when the Hivox is killed, but I can implement it in lots of other different scenarios in the future. But you might be wondering: why is DeltaTime so painful to implement?

Well, it actually depends on when you implement it. Really, if you’re going to implement it at all (why wouldn’t you?), you would implement it from the beginning of development, and it’s extremely easy and simple to do it that way. The problem is, the longer you wait to implement it, the harder it will be. If your game is pretty well established, you may have to recode hours of work just to implement this feature, just to make the code run slightly differently. Luckily, I didn’t have to redo that much code, as the game is still under heavy development.

One other thing I managed to implement was the different sprites for different elements on the basic gun, which is only the start of a long, long journey of continuous art creation which I find extremely boring.

Anyway, no promises but I’ll try my best to continue making steady progress on Slugger throughout June.