A Whole Game's Worth of Bottlecaps

Heyo! This is just a quick post on some of the updates we’ve made to bottlecaps, as well as the bottlecap collection screen.

Firstly- there’s now over 200 unique bottlecap designs! All of the bottlecaps for the entire game now have sprites & visual data. 

Well, kind of- 200 is just an estimate of how many bottlecaps the final game will have. This estimate is based on three collectables: Pikmin 2’s treasures (201), Celeste’s strawberries (202), and The End Is Nigh’s unique tumors (202). (Including Celeste’s golden berries and excluding TEiN’s cartridge tumors.)

Some of the new bottlecaps & redesigned bottlecaps.

The final game’s bottlecap count might be smaller or bigger than this- but either way, I’m prepared to keep designing bottlecaps & use only the best and most interesting designs among them. I may go on to design 250 or 300 bottlecaps, only to use 220 of them, for example. Extra bottlecaps could also be relegated to achievements, or a shop.

Of the 200+ bottlecaps, 170 of them now have names and descriptions! This is thanks to two of my friends- Poochy and Vegas- contributing to the bottlecap spreadsheet over the span of a few weeks.

The next big thing to announce is: bottlecaps can now have unique rims & backsides! In order to better view the backside, you can now manually rotate bottlecaps as well.

Technically speaking, this custom rims / backsides always existed on the sprite side- it was the collection screen’s model that actually needed to be updated.

There’s one more change I’ve made to make each bottlecap more unique from each other: bottlecaps now have metallic maps! These are used to determine which parts of the bottlecap are reflective and how intense the reflection is. I’ve adjusted the bottlecap mesh to push the effect a little further as well.

While I was worried about the additional workload these changes would bring, creating each of these unique elements- rims, metallic maps, and backs- takes very little time. 

The square sprites are used for the label & metallic map. The long rectangular sprite below that is used for the model’s rim & rim metallic map. Rims are largely recolors of one another, and I only need a few colors for most of the cap designs.

Of course, work is still progressing smoothly on Cherry Carry Cascade. Finishing is such a huge hurdle, but I’m ready to move on. Currently, I aim to have this new build out within 2-3 weeks; it’s just decoration that’s left. Thanks again for your support and patience!