50 wishlists?! D: Okay okay, I'll show development progress!

Hey everyone! Somehow we managed to accrue 50 wishlists! You guys are incredible. Giving up was never a thought in my head (I'm an obsessive person) but you guys being on the list makes me RABID about pushing harder, iterating faster, devving more, and generally putting me into overdrive so we can ship this project on time >:DI feel like an injustice has been done to most of you seeing as the Steam page is literally EMPTY screenshots with no sense of sound, the world, the setting or the peds aside from the earlier announcement. This is something I will be addressing once I'm done figuring out CAR-JACKING today! Until then - here's the only thing I have on file rn: the result of a test of a custom loot system .AND here is basically my internal "patch notes" that I use to keep track of progress, if you're into that sort of thing. Promise I'll be back! Start a conversation with me anywhere (here in Steam, on Discord, etc) and I'll reply with questions, or entertain fun ideas you may have for the game. In addition, if you ever want to voice an NPC reaction (like "THIS SUCKS" or "GET OFF THE ROAD @&(#@#") absolutely just hop in Discord and we'll set it up. My relatives and wife are already helping with placeholder voices that honestly may end up being in the final game, they're so organic and funny.Enough rambling - here's PATCH NOTES v0.1!!!

5 February

- Kicked off the main game project in Unity after mucking around in Unreal... Here we go. Not a total cold start - still have some of my homebrew assets (blender files, cities..)

- Added celebration animation and voice hook when a customer gets served.

- Built voice lines for customers and squashed annoying queue pathing race (e.g. rushing to a spot)

8 February

- Taught pedestrians to dodge oncoming vehicles. LOL. Keeping the kungfu leap. (revise root motion stuff later). #worth

- Made street props smashable with vehicles

- Fixed pedestrians freezing on first spawn (took forever).

- Added despawn timer reset on repeat hits. Sneaky workflow for swapping badly batched props with prefabs

- PEDESTRIANS NOW FLEE LOL. (Cascading panic system — they flee in waves after deaths now.)

10 - 12 February

- Added what is called "rubbernecking" apparently: pedestrians gawk at death scenes with smartphones, smh. Rebaked lighting while at it.

- Centralised night-time thresholds (headlights/carlights) into one config. Was scattered everywhere.

- Built runtime bone-attached hand props and culled some unused scenes. Good riddance lol.

- Tuned destructible prop knockback so driving would feel fantastic. Tried batch tool for applying settings across prefabs faster.

- Bridged melee combat into the damage system and killed a 20ms performance bottleneck (it was the damn shadows). HELL YEAH.

- Optimised rendering; ambient lighting switch and shadow distance tuning

- Hooked up player kick attacks to the damage system and fixed ragdoll launch direction - it was -1 for some reason (future note).

13 February

- Updated pedestrian prefabs and inspector settings.

- Organised animation assets and added some third-party packs to .gitignore... pls no crash

- Built a shadow budget for streetlights. ~25 FPS gain at night with the streetlamps on. Phew.

- Shifted shadow evaluation forward along movement direction and pushed distance to 35m

- Cleaned up HUD... disabled compass (maybe if community wants it back - its still there) and unused ability slots.

- Added smooth fade-in for streetlights entering range. Was popping in before. 0.5 is the sweet spot for perf/feel.

- Built a headlight shadow budget. Also, cheeky fix to the culling mask tool.

15 February

- OMG. Integrated queue system into the main city scene. FIRST "SALE"!!

- Rebaked lighting, tuned headlights moar

- Spent way too long on multi-shop queue infrastructure (for bigger cities this is going to be a PITA) and a proximity waypoint mapper.

- Added proximity-based customer calling with debug gizmos

- Hacked together a one layer fixer tool to mass-fix physics layers across all pedestrians/customers.

16 February

- Fixed the bone layer fixer moving colliders to the wrong layer. ...drove me nuts.

- Added ragdoll pose matching -- no more T-pose flash on melee death

- Built my very own performance overlay with GPU/CPU timing. Thanks YouTube

- Reverted URP settings regression from weeks ago. Annoyance but gone.

16 - 18 February

Holy, zero progress, basically it was house visiting for Chinese New Year and we get back 11pm every day tuckered out and sugar crashing plus drained from blackjack, hah. Sadly (or thankfully for the project) here we only get two days off for this so it's BACK TO WORK on -

19 - 20 February

- Tried batch tool for snapshotting 400+ inspector fields, in case i fk things up

- Reworked settings memorizer to be smarter about which components to skip

- Swapped main character model and fixed hair transparency. Took forever, thanks to Amina for coming through.

- Fixed pedestrians orbiting in circles like headless geese during flee actions.

- Overhauled pedestrian avoidance, they yield and step aside properly now, but need to find that "sidestep" animation or do it myself tbh

- Stripped a spare player rig that was DOUBLING draw calls and culled shadow casters.

- NULL REFERENCE HUNT in pedestrian system

- Built rival shop queue system with destination routing. Nailed it.

- (PATHFINDING - HUGE). Added loyalty-based customer routing with rival recruitment and fallback.

21 February

- Managed to hack together per-customer loyalty billboards with tier colours

- Randomised pedestrian colours per-instance. No more clone armies.. may extend to cars.

- Built shop HUD — loyalty bar, per-till cash displays, cross-system event bridge.

22 February

- Fixed loyalty bar fill direction. Was backwards.

- Built a 3D boba cup "health bar" with liquid shader and wobble physics. #worth

- Inspired by WeakAuras... Added a HUD layout editor for players — drag, reposition, disabled UI/HUD elements, saves between sessions.

- Upgraded bubble tea with procedural shader bubbles and boba pearl swirl

- Fixed cursor not showing in HUD edit mode.

- Built settings menu — 3 quality tiers, 6 resolution options.

- Fixed AI ground detection — added road layer to the check. Dudes kept falling through.

- Polished HUD edit mode — green pulse highlights, game pause, bubble tea drag.

- Fixed bubble tea fill threshold and pearl scaling

- Added clock, stamina, health text to HUD layout. Hid the shield bar.

- Built radial timer for car hop speed buff with pulse warning.

- Fixed buff UI — circle sprite, hidden by default, clockwise wipe direction.

- Built item dispenser and debug transaction trigger. Cheeky fix to cashier counter layers too.

23 February

- Man, Unity's error console sucks. Found out how to do our own log suppression.... also killed 44K+ spam entries burning up to 12ms every frame. Sweet relief.

- Added hover tooltips to HUD edit mode with mouse icon hookup.

- Documented plans for screenshot enhancer and easter egg pass.

- Added 14 profiler markers to our own spike analyzer.

- Added wall validation to pedestrian lane offsets. (its called "whiskers' lol). Homies were walking through walls or just bashing into them. HUGE WIN.

- Tuned spike analyzer — raised threshold, capped logs, auto-prune

- Made queued customers kinematic so they stop getting shoved around. Peace at last. (But they can still be punched apparently)

24 February

- Built floating transaction popups — cash in gold, loyalty in RED!

- Built weapon loadout editor. Reorganised the tools menu while at it.

- Added Apply button to weapon editor for live runtime changes

- Switched weapon loadout to JSON config. Was hardcoded before.

- Added persistent weapon loadout saving - but must revisit before launch/demo.

25 - 28 February

- Built item equip system with parallel hotbar and diamond-shaped HUD selectors. SO worth it. Looking good man

- Cos we're not made of gold, made voice-over recorder tool and pedestrian death voice system with ragdoll-following audio. wife helped with ladies lol

- Switched from Bakery to APV lighting to FINALLY fix the day-night weird mapping. Massive cleanup pass — deleted 500MB+ of dead assets. Never again.

- Refactored APV lighting.. batch-disabled specular highlights on 600+ matte materials.

- Built wet road system with weather-reactive puddles and specular. HOLY CRAP LOOKS GOOD

- Added pedestrian knockover for the new vehicle system

1 March

- Fixed puddle shader keyword bug and added depth-based edge falloff. Couldn't unsee it.

- Built screenshot enhancer — photo mode hotkey, clipboard copy, meme caption compositor. HELL YEAH.

- Added horn honking when traffic stops for the player.

- Fixed female pedestrians using male death screams. ...shouldn't have shipped that.

2 March

- ZINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG. Loot drop system — loot tables, editor tools, billboard nameplates. pls don't go crazy this isn't an ARPG xD

- Fixed bloom washing out loot nameplates. FINALLY. Actually this boosted framerates by 15 (lesson learned..)

- Increased ragdoll bone mass to ~70 kg across pedestrian prefabs. Some were flying "too far", but we may go back in the future lol

- Refined pedestrian death lifecycle — corpse fade, funny chalk outlines, rubberneck release. (better for framerates and natural feel of the world.) police/ambulance reactions in future maybe.

THAT'S IT. For a month of work, it.. wow. It feels incredible and I'm getting better and faster at these things, learning from stupid mistakes, learning some weird bugs I would always sometimes encounter as a player but now as a dev I have to solve them, which means i understand why the bugs happened now. Can't wait till you guys dogpile on during testing so I have infinite puzzles to solve.Thanks for wishlisting, and I WILL NOT DISAPPOINT!!!!!! (my brain is just exploding with how many things I want to do, but I know hitting the timeline is paramount.)