Update 1.0.2 is here, but it really is a tiny one this time - nothing to get excited about, really - just a few minor fixes that I thought I may as well push out now ahead of the much bigger July update (which is when new content will start to arrive).
So, what's new:
----- TRADING CARDS -----
I've just enabled Trading Card drops for Wrongworld. I'm not completely sure how this'll work for people who have already played the game, but I'm assume you'll be given cards retroactively based on your previous play time. We'll find out soon enough, I suppose!
Either way, there are now 7 cards, 5 profile backgrounds, and 5 emoticons to collect, if you like such things!
----- COMBAT LOCK-ON CHANGES -----
Previously, pressing Left Shift more than once would toggle the lock on between the two nearest targets, and to cancel it, you needed to press Escape or hold Left Shift for about 0.3 seconds. Personally, I rarely use the lock on system myself, but after watching other people struggle a little with that system, I realised it wasn't very intuitive!
So, the system now works a little differently, so it's hopefully less fiddly for people.
Now, press Left Shift once, and it'll lock on to a nearby enemy. Press it again, and it'll cancel the lock on. Simple, no more toggling between multiple nearby beasties, so hopefully less frustrating for players. While writing this, I've literally just realised that there's a potential flaw in the way it selects the target (perhaps not always selecting the nearest enemy, although it should do that in the vast majority of cases), but it'll be easy enough to improve on this again in future. D'oh.
Oh, also, the lock on will still automatically be cancelled if you move out of range of your target beastie.
----- RANDOM UPDATES/FIXES -----
- Tweaked the collision box for all the flowers, so the fearsome hamster mount should no longer be suddenly stopped in its tracks by puny petals. Must've had a pollen allergy. They can still get in your way a bit, but it should be better now, and less like riding straight into a brick wall!
- Fixed a few issues with the Spring Beasts:
1) They should no longer be able to cheat by stealing your structures through walls.
2) They'll now bounce away from water when they have a structure in their mouth and you're chasing them.
3) They shouldn't be able to accidentally drop your structures under the sea.
4) You can now target them using the lock-on system.
5) Repulsion Turrets now destroy them (I decided this was better than launching them into the distance... That was less than ideal if they happened to have one of your structures on their mouth at the time!).
- Tweaked the tooltip for the Post Processing graphics setting to help clarify that's what you'd need to change to disable Motion Blur.
Because this update is such a small, pathetic one in general, I also feel the need to explain why so little progress has been made over the last month, so here are a few other things I've been working on, which ultimately haven't panned out (yet):
Most of May was spent trying my best to do marketing and other launch-related things.
Early June, my brain finally melted from the rather insane level of work I've been doing over the last 18 months, so I decided to have a week or so away from my computer to recharge my batteries, which was very much needed! And it did me a lot of good!
After that, I spent a few days with the graphics settings system to try to separate Motion Blur from the other Post Processing settings, planning to add a toggle for that. Alas, I couldn't get it to work properly. The Unreal Engine lumps Motion Blur in with all the other Post Processing settings, and it's much more fiddly than you might imagine to affect only the Motion Blur! In the end, because there actually aren't that many other Post Processing effects, I decided to abandon that and crack on with other updates instead. With Post Processing set to "Low" (which disables Motion Blur), the only other thing you're really missing out on would be the light bloom from the sun, so hopefully that's something people can do without if it means they don't have to vomit on their computer due to motion sickness!
I then spent about 3 or 4 days wrestling with an indoor lighting system, but, in the end, I've had to abandon that idea for now. Which is annoying, because I would like it to be possible to craft lights for inside your house, but it caused a lot of problems. Some of you might already know that the game is completely dynamically lit, and that means that shadow-casting is probably the most performance-intensive thing in the whole game. For example, if your PC isn't amazing and you craft a bunch of Spotlights, you might notice things start to slow down a little, especially if some of those lights are overlapping. So, when it came to indoor lights, I wanted to develop a system that automatically toggled the lights' ability to cast shadows when they were too close together or if they were far enough from the player, but this caused its own set of problems, things I hadn't considered before attempting to develop it.
Let's say you put one of these lights in your house and it casts shadows... Great - it looks lovely from both inside and outside your house, and isn't too performance-guzzling! Now let's say to craft 5 of these lights inside your house, all overlapping each other, casting shadows all over the place... It looks very nice, but, on older computers, the game suffers a big loss of FPS. "Okay", I thought, "Not the end of the world. I'll be clever and tweak some of their shadow-casting and lighting depending on whether you're inside or outside your house, and how many are overlapping". Turning off some of their shadow-casting abilities just looks weird from inside your house, when some are casting shadows and others aren't, and from outside, it looks downright ridiculous. When I disable shadow-casting for a light and you're stood outside your house, the walls of your house no longer cast shadows, meaning that the light is free to travel through them, so your house has a glow around it and looks stupid! Another way around this would be to have indoor lights completely disabled when you're outside your house but, like the existing issues with the weather visibility toggling, that isn't ideal, because you could technically remove one of the walls of your house and see the lights toggling and it'd look silly, and probably be more distracting than it is pretty. Another option would be to simply prevent players from placing the lights too close to each other, but I can imagine that might add more frustration over the restrictions than it would add joy from being able to craft them in the first place!
Basically, I tried a bunch of different methods to get this working correctly, but, in the end, none of them were perfect, they all added their own problems, and, ultimately, they nearly caused my brain to explode in a fit of frustration. So, I drew a line under it all and moved on to developing something else instead! I might revisit this at some point, but I really want to work on adding big new fun things now instead, expanding the scope of the game in meaningful ways, rather than relatively minor things like this.
I also spent a few days playing around with a potential map/minimap system. I got a prototype version of this up and running, but it does really heavily suck the challenge out of navigating. Personally, I think it makes it too easy to just kind of go a bit brain-dead and rely on it all the time, no longer having to keep track of things yourself, using Flagpoles intelligently and things like that. If I do have another stab at a map system, I'm much more inclined to give you an in-game sheet of paper which you can draw on and attempt to sketch your own map. To me, that sounds like much more fun, and involves the player in a much more entertaining way than an automatic map system does. And, thanks to suggestions I've received, I'm also considering expanding on the Flagpole/Sign Post system so it offers a waypoint-style system, whereby you can label them however you want, then select one and the game will show an arrow guiding you to it. And some kind of craftable compass is still on the cards, too.
Oh, and once I realised Valve had given the game the green light to have Trading Cards, I spent a couple of days away from regular development while I designed the cards and backgrounds and stuff.
And, finally, I think I've got the Unreal Engine set up now in a way that will allow me to compile a Linux version of the game. Still much testing to be done on this front, but I just wanted to let Linux folk know that I haven't forgotten about you. I'm still aiming for a Mac version too at some point, but I need to save up for a decent Mac to compile on first, and I just can't spare the funds at the moment, unfortunately.
So, long story short, it's been a weird few weeks development-wise - lots of niggly little tasks, not a lot to show for it - but I think that's all over and done with now and I can get back to normal development (I have actually already started working on some other things that aren't mentioned here as well - new content stuff - but nothing that was ready in time for this update). I just wanted you guys to know that there are valid reasons for the slow-down in new content, and it doesn't reflect a change in my own dedication to the game at all! Honestly, I'm dying to get back to my normal development schedule and start firing out more regular updates again! Normal service shall resume shortly! :)
Anyway, enough rambling! As always, if you have any feedback or encounter any problems, please do let me know.
And feel free to come and say hello on the Wrongworld Discord. I haven't been using it much for the last month or so (so I could really focus on what I've been working on and avoid any potential procrastination), but I plan to start checking in more often again from now on. I miss speaking to the community!
