Hey everyone!
It's been a busy few weeks over at Lavaboots. We're trying to go through the game and polish, update, and fix everything we can before an early access launch. We feel the game has a good bit of content at the moment and so our focus is making sure we have all the necessary systems in place and that the game is as balanced and bug free as possible.
Here's a look at some things we've been working on recently!
New Guns
If you've been following Wild West and Wizards, then you know one major aspect of the game is loot. We want there to be a ton of loot and for you to get excited when you open a chest or defeat a boss. We've spent a lot of time adding in different rarities of armor, weapons, and abilities. Most commonly you'll find armor but rarely you'll get a new gun upgrade or a new ability. On top of that, because we have our item level system, you'll be able to spend your gold and upgrade your abilities as you level.
So for example let's you see find a rare shotgun that you really like at level 7, but then at level 12 it's starting to lag behind some of the current guns you're using. With our item upgrade system, you can level that gun up so it can stay current and powerful with your level. You can also level up armor and abilities.
Over the last few weeks our main focus as far as loot goes has been adding new weapons. We've been working on adding some static weapon drops at bosses and also a pool of uncommon and rare weapons you can loot from chests. There are currently six weapon types in the world: revolvers, shotguns, double barrel shotguns, sawed off double barrel shotguns, rifles, and repeaters. Within each of those categories we've got different rarities, colors, and stats. Each gun functions differently as far as damage, range, rate of fire, bullet spread, etc.
Overall we're pretty happy with the current pool of loot (over 300 items and counting) but we will continually be adding more as the game develops.
UI Updates
We want your experience playing the game to be as easy and intuitive as possible, so we've been doing some work on the UI to make that happen. We've added functionality where you can now pretty much drag and drop an item wherever you want and that there are multiple ways to do things so it's easy to figure out. We've also rearranged some things such as your utility bar and added text to let you know that you can hold certain buttons to open your radial menus. This is an area we'll likely keep updating as we get more feedback but we wanted it to be in a good place at launch and be easy to figure out.
We've also starting working on a settings menu to let you adjust audio, graphics, and things of that nature!
New Quests
As always we try to continually add new quests and things to do in the game with each update. We've recently added more quests to the starting area of the game to help you get acquainted with some of the mechanics and to earn some decent loot to get you started on your adventure. In addition to that we've added in a recommended level feature so when you obtain a quest, you can see what level you want to be before attempting it. Some quests may require you to travel farther into the world to some dangerous areas and this will help you know what you're getting into.
Ice Wizards
We've recently added ice wizards as an enemy that can spawn in addition to the fire wizards. Since magic is a big part of the game, we want enemies to have different abilities they can use on you. This means now you have to watch for wizards casting fireballs that can do damage over time, or wizards casting ice shards that can slow down your movement speed. This is an area we're still updating so that we can have more enemy ability variations in the future.
Optimization and Bug Fixes
When making a large open world it's very easy to lose performance quickly when developing. There's a ton of things going on all around you and you have to optimize it in a way where it looks good but still runs smooth. We've spent a lot of time doing everything we can to make sure the game runs as good as possible. We use some streaming systems and other things so that you can see far out into the world but it won't bog down your performance. Recently we updated pretty much all building interiors to be their own "loadable" area which has helps a great deal in towns as far as performance goes. We've also built some systems to limit how far away AI will spawn which has also helped quite a bit.
In addition to optimization we've also fixed a ton of bugs. We've pretty much been playing through as much of the game as possible looking for any issues and trying to polish it up. Our main focus is always to fix any major or game-breaking bugs, but since we've got most of those under control, we've been able to polish and fix a lot more minor things as well.
Other Changes
Some other things we've been working on include new music and balancing. We're still adding more music to the game but our main focus has been making sure towns have music, bosses have music, and that there are some song variations when exploring the wilds. In addition to that we're still spending a good bit of time balancing the game such as enemy health and damage, how many enemies there are, and what kind of stats the player has as well.
Thank you for your reading and as always we'd love to hear your feedback!