A couple of months have passed just twiddling my thumbs, but not in an idle way! I got myself a Steam Deck, which definitely makes the game more fun for me to test. With numerous iterations of test builds, I've gotten the game to a great shape with optimization improvements and other polish.

The game is now in a state where I'm happy to shift my full focus on just making new content after this update. However, here's what it contains:


While the "Steam Deck Verified" badge will have to wait for possible approval process whenever Valve may have time for it in the unforeseeable future, the game runs well on my Steam Deck (which has the original, 1280x800 screen) with a certain adjustment done in the device's options.

In these videos, the colors are a bit blown out due to my camera, or skills of using it.

I optimized the game's Medium quality to run well on the Deck. I'd say the frame rate stays above 30fps 90% of the time. The moments it doesn't are lag spikes that happen when opening doors (caused by a group of objects being enabled and/or post processing volume getting changed), and some moments in missions that contain more complex lighting. However, those situations aren't ones the player has to linger in, and are often caused by characters with carried torches. Most of the time, especially indoors, it stays in 40-60fps range.

However, one thing has to be changed in the Steam Deck's settings. TDP Limit has to be cranked to maximum, 15 Watts, from the Performance tab of Quick Settings. It's a setting that limits the power use to improve battery life. Without doing this change, the device can start "throttling" its CPU and GPU. They get dramatically slower and the frame rate drops to 1. However, I optimized the Medium Quality (default on Steam Deck) so that it doesn't happen with that TDP Limit set to maximum.

I've only tested on the original 1280x800 screen. The game is clearly GPU capped, so with the 1920x1200 screen upgrade it would surely not run as well. Anyway, I guess players could balance at will between resolution and setting the quality to "Low" in options (which definitely eases the GPU's burden a lot, while also looking a lot worse).

Text input on Steam Deck also works.


Another change in this update that I consider quite big, is modifying the AI so that some friendly AI characters can now fight enemies. There are two points where this can happen and they’re in the second and third mission.


Having watched many gameplay videos of the game, it has seemed to be a recurring thing that the player stops after the first mission. To try and make them likelier to continue after the first meters, I did some changes to the flow of the missions:

• Removed a couple of long, pointless boat trips, cutting them by a fade that loads the next scene
  
• Removed some unnecessary conversations with captains that mainly just summed up what the player had done.
  
• Shortened some conversations and removing clutter, with a mentality that the point of every conversation is just to tell the player what to do next and why. There are still some conversations that also hint some background of the world or side characters, but those are kept very short.

There are also lots of smaller fixes. Improvements on the first person camera deserve a special mention. There used to be moments where the camera was fully following the movement of the head, like opening a door, or picking up an object. I’ve limited the camera movement on those to be much more smooth and pleasant. This allowed me to include some slight head bob by default, which adds some immersion without much of a tradeoff of motion sickness in my opinion. However, you can adjust and disable it from options.


I guess this screenshot says it all:

List of other changes in this update:

• Changed the default pad control layout to feel more convenient (it can be changed in options though)
  
• fixed some bugs related to carrying bombs and placing torches on wall holders
  
• worked on the quality settings a bit, making the "medium" and "low" lighter, with adjustments like shadow quality, reducing the grass view distance and reducing the number of particles according to the quality setting in some cases
  
• Some UI elements were misplaced in different aspect ratios than 16/9
  
• Improved the way camera works in climbing stairs (still not perfect though)
  
• There were weird character scale problems, sometimes making it taller after vaulting to a crowsnest
  
• New objects are now shown in the middle of the screen, making them super clear
  
• A small change to swapping climbables: it now happens with the Use button (instead of Jump, which can be used to detach to freefall), and vaulting on a predetermined spot happens the same way
  
• Improved the mechanic of "tumbling down" with physics
  
• Jump takedown looks less janky
  
• Improvement in browsing maps with pad
  
• Numerous small fixes/adjustments to missions

These small fixes:

-map view doesn't have weird extra panning movement in the beginning
-made grappling hook glow in the dark, when it's not carried by player
-fixed small objects not being selectable when right next to a body
-grappling hook got dropped when winching, instead of attached to back
-door highlights haven't been working for some time
-it was possible to fall through deck in big frigate

I did a couple of rounds of playing through the campaign, making notes, and fixing bugs and other details.

I've also been working on the new iteration of the game's website that sheds some light to the game's mechanics with shorter and longer clips of gameplay: https://gustofwindgame.com


[gustofwindgame.com]Here's a list of fixes in this patch:

• Small additions to 3rd mission (stealable boat, another trader)
  
• Made some pipes on the walls on Mission 2 climbable
  
• Saves now handle dialogs better (loading the current state of conversation rather than starting it from the beginning)
  
• Interaction highlight improvements, especially with doors (still room for improvement with overlapping items though)
  
• Storing the current state of time bombs in save
  
• Map view improvements
  
• Small changes to missions after a couple of playthroughs
  
• Fixed weapons dropped by passing out/dying enemies falling through floor in the mine
  
• Solved some moments of bad optimization inside the ship in Mission 3 (getting inside, and walking in the officer quarters).
  
• Boat can be now rowed with a body on it (don't know why you would, but you can...)
  
• Holding the "ready to throw" button while falling to water caused a bug, which is now fixed (same thing with climbing and vaulting)

Having learned what the actual bottlenecks were in the trial and error process of optimization, it was necessary to go back on some of the changes I did on Mission 1 outro that didn't really improve frame rate but took away from the experience. I've now combined the best parts of old version and new version, without compromising frame rate.

The changes of this patch have to do with character placements, dialog and objectives in that scene.

If you're interested in how the sausage is made, here's a blog post about various tricks and techniques I've used in Gust of Wind to keep the number of shadows, draw calls, dynamic physics objects and the overall number of polygons on screen to a minimum:

[gustofwindgame.com]ːsteamthisː

Pretty much all the points in the post have been in use for a long time, but here's a few optimizations added in this update:

• Terrain details (like rocks and trees) that are far away are more performant and look much better, because I changed them to "impostors" from low-poly meshes
  
• All doors that are not connected to the room player is currently in, are hidden
  
• A bunch of code optimizations
  
• Updating the water plugins used allowed me do improvements like disabling floating scripts from objects that don't currently need them, and disabling the water renderer when not needed (instead of masking it out from the camera)

I used Amplify Impostors plugin to generate "impostor" versions of terrain details, allowing lots of smooth looking rocks and trees with great performance. It's hard to see which rocks are impostors (the ones closer being just regular models of course), but that's what makes them great. The geometry of an impostor is just a plane, but they take their texture by picking the right one from an atlas with lots of views from that rock asset from different directions.
There are some bugfixes as well, but I have a hard time tracking which ones are for bugs that came up with the optimizations, and which ones are actual bugfixes to the previous version. I also worked on the overall flow of the third mission with small changes on some details regarding objectives, making it more enjoyable in my opinion.

I replaced the lightness indicator in HUD with a rim light for the third person perspective. The character is split in 8 parts corresponding the points in player that AI can see when they're lit, so that the rim light can be shown in those body parts separately. The indicator introduced in the previous update still remains in first person perspective. Here's a video of the rim light in action. As you can see, it adjusts to the color and intensity and changes in appearance depending on which direction the currently most affecting light source is.

Also, this video is a bit older so it doesn't have the rim light, but it shows some changes I did to the dialog in the second part of Mission 1 (mainly making the dialogs shorter while introducing characters one by one without much of going back and forth).

Added a lighting indicator that helps with keeping in shadows:
Other changes:

• progress in the first mission was sometimes blocked by a notification "Enemies know the door is open, loading from save". Fixed a bug that was causing this.
  
• fixed double music sometimes on in mission 3
  
• for mission 3, changed Behemoth layout a bit, added another guard, adjusted their paths, and made a bunch of bugfixes smoothing out this environment specifically
  
• character got stuck when jumping to shallow water
  
• sometimes lantern got extinguished just after lighting it
  
• character got stuck after canceling lighting lantern

The most visual change in this update is probably some layout changes I did for the interior of a huge frigate in the third mission. I split it into three sections divided by walls, so that only one section's contents need to be visible at a time, which helped a bunch with optimization. Here are some views of the renewed interior:
I also added a carriable horn that guards can use to alert nearest enemies on a radius. The player can use it too of course, if they wish to make a grand entrance or just want to see how the enemies react.
In addition, there are just lots of small bugfixes on the mechanics and missions, like the points below:

AI:

• fixed enemy door interaction animations not working when he's coming to view from a different room
  
• fixed enemies not following player to different rooms very likely
  
• enemies now wake up more easily
  
• enemies rotated suddenly
  
• enemies don't try to find weapons behind locked doors anymore (which was making them freeze)

Save/Load:

• bodies stay where they fell after loading game
  
• lit lantern wasn't lit after load, also the model is parented weird
  
• book was open when carrying after loading game
  
• fixed the character dropping to water when loading a save on boat

Interaction/Player Movement

• book's pages were blinking when turning page, and a letter's content wasn't visible in some cases
  
• fixed issues with lantern, like enemies not seeing with it, and the physics not working when carried by an enemy
  
• weapons can strike walls and make an impact sound
  
• falling ceased for the duration of flinching and two-handed attack
  
• Prevented carried torch clipping through walls with IK
  
• Prevented throwing grappling hook in tight spaces

Mission 1 pt2:

• figured out ways to make the scene optimized, while showing captured live enemies and dead bodies with numbers reflecting playstyle

Mission 2:

• level design tweaks, making it more optimized
  
• added some dead trees outside
  
• lighting improvements
  
• solved some problems with enemy visibility

Mission 3:

• splitting interior into 3 sections, updating the map
  
• added enemies inside cottages, improved the lighting and decoration in them