Hello Gamecrafters!
We’d like to start by giving a warm welcome to all new crafters that have joined us as part of the Gamecraft free weeklong giveaway and everyone else who picked it up recently! We’re looking forward to seeing all the amazing things you create and share, and we hope you’ll stick with us on this journey through Early Access. With that, we have another update to share with all crafters, new and old! We’ve added another HUD block and a few more incredibly powerful Physics blocks, along with some QoL changes.
We have made a video that quickly covers some of the changes and shows the process of making a quick and easy game, but if you want to read the full patch notes, they are listed below.
More Physics Blocks
We’ve seen the first set of the amazing Physics Movers, Rotators and Dampeners from the previous update used in some really awesome builds but we know there were a couple of missing pieces that could really open up their potential, so we’ve added a few more of those in this update!
Movement & Rotation Constrainers
We’ll start with the Constrainers. These parts are extremely useful at keeping objects exactly where you want them and even creating 2D gameplay!
Constrainers have three stats which can be toggled on and off, one for each axis. By default these are all ’Enabled’. This means that the Constrainer is not affecting that axis, so it can move freely. Setting the stat to ‘Disabled’ will completely lock any movement or rotation along the specified axis. As an example, locking the ‘red’ axis of this Movement Constrainer will completely stop it from moving up or down, no matter what you throw at it.
The same applies to the Rotation Constrainer. Locking a single axis will completely stop any rotation around it. Combining the two together and locking every axis will make everything connected to them completely static, like grass!
These constraints can only be set during build mode, and the blocks work on a ‘time start’ axis reference rather than local. We felt that this would be the most intuitive setup but we’re open to feedback on how this feels and whether it could unlock more gameplay if we allowed them to be toggled during simulation.
Advanced Dampeners
While the previous Movement and Rotation Dampeners are extremely useful at limiting the speed and velocity of your creations, we know that you don’t always want to slow down the entire thing. That’s why we've added the Advanced Movement and Rotation Dampeners!
As you can expect, these have the same core functionality as their standard versions and will reduce the speed or angular velocity of the body they are attached to by a given percentage. These have the added bonus of being able to pick and choose the axis you want affected. Let’s say you wanted to add a makeshift brake system for your hover car; you only want to slow down movement in the forward axis, not all three. Sending a positive signal to the green axis, if the block is rotated in a certain way, will only dampen the speed the build moves in that direction, still letting it move sideways at full speed.
Game Over HUD
Next on the list of HUD blocks is the Game Over HUD. This one should be pretty straight forward but we’ll give you some pointers on how it works.
Arguably one of the core parts of a “game” is the ability to end it. While there have been some very creative implementations of this already, from teleporting the player to a special box with “You Win” scrawled on a text block to simply throwing them off the map if they lose, we wanted to give crafters a simpler and more consistent way of setting up end conditions.
The Game Over block has two main text fields for you to fill out; the header and the body. Header test will appear right at the top of the screen, in a massive, pulsating label, which is ideal for short, snappy titles like “You Lose” or “First Place!” Under that is the body text, which can be used to give a little more information, like a bit of story on how Leo was unfortunately crushed by a falling box.
On top of that we’ve added our first block with tweakable sounds! That’s right, after you’ve customized your text, you can choose an appropriate sound effect from our curated list to give your “game over” the proper feel. From serious to silly, you’ll find the right sound to end your game with.
The Game Over HUD also shows any Game Stat HUD panels that were being used, such as a timer showing your final time or a counter showing how many coins you collected along the way.
Under those you’ll see some familiar icons from the details screen of the Play Games and Prefab Workshop screens. You’ll be able to like, subscribe and favorite games from within the game, rather than having to remember after you exit.
Finally, you’ll see a Replay and a Quit button. If you want to have another shot at landing that final jump or trying to find that final hidden coim, just click Replay and you'll be taken back to the start of the game, or you can quit back to the game’s details page.
Pro Tip: These work with our multichannel wiring system too so you have full control over what each player sees and when they see it! Setting this block to the Player channel could let you show a game over screen when one player falls off a platform while the other carries on playing.
Additional Changes
That's not all though! We’ve made some improvements to a few key areas that were highlighted by the recent wave of new crafters. We hope there's something nice in here for everyone.
Character Movement Improvements
We’ve seen a lot of complaints about character movement, particularly when it comes to platforming games, so we’ve made a few simple changes that we think should make platforming, and moving around in general, feel a bit nicer.
The first change is to remove the little bit of momentum that Leo carries when you release a key. Now, when you let go of W, Leo will stop instantly. This should make it much easier to stick the landing on tricky platformer games.
The second change is a slight tweak to the collider around Leo’s feet. Previously, Leo had a rounded base, which can make it harder to balance on the edge of platforms. To combat this we’ve flattened the base off a bit to make it a bit more like a smoother out, upside down trapezoid. This still gives you some flexibility to walk up small lips and steps but makes it less prone to slipping off the edge of a platform.
Let us know how these changes feel and we can always consider a few more alternatives to try and make moving around more enjoyable.
Uniform Scaling for Logic Blocks
While the Logic and Math blocks are mainly used for their functionality rather than their looks, we know having a giant Counter or Timer in your games can look epic. As the first part of making all of these parts more useful for aesthetic purposes, we’ve given all blocks in the “Logic” category of the Inventory the ability to be uniformly scaled. It’s now possible to stick a giant computer screen in your game if you really want to.
Later on we’ll be reworking these models to remove the remaining baseplates and wires to make them a bit more in line with the State and HUD blocks.
Improvements to Graphics
We’ve made a few small adjustments to the visual appeal of Gamecraft, now that we’ve reduced some performance overhead in other areas, that we think will really make things look nicer in general.
The first change is to fix the tiling effect on Grass and Dirt blocks. When these parts first appeared with our triplanar shader, there would be a lovely tile effect, giving the terrain a bit of life. That got a little washed out over time so we’ve gone and brought that back to its old splendor.
Additionally, we’ve made a few big changes to the fog as we know that was something that came up frequently. We’re still planning to give crafters the tools to tweak the fog, lighting and a variety of other settings down the line, after we’ve cleared out some of the bigger core features on our list. The fog has been pushed further back in general, made less dense, and its contrast has been reduced so it should be less intrusive in ‘indoor’ areas and at distance.
Lastly, we’ve made a few minor changes to the lighting; ambient light at the horizon is a touch lighter, contrast in the colour grading is reduced and the foreground colours are much brighter than the background now.
Small Multiplayer Optimizations
We know multiplayer is still in an extremely barebones state right now and that it isn’t all that enjoyable due to errors and performance issues, which is why it’s still tucked away behind commands and not overly public right now. We’ve taken some time to identify the biggest problem areas though and made some plans on how to tackle those going forward.
While most of these issues are going to be a lot of work, we’ve taken the chance to make some small adjustments and fix some pesky issues in the short term to make things a bit more enjoyable while we dig into the bigger tasks.
The biggest change we’ve done for this update is to fix some of the memory issues that happen when players first connect to a server. While the issue isn’t completely arrested, we were seeing at up to a 50% reduction in memory usage during the connection phase internally. This should prevent issues from cropping up for a little while longer when playing and make things a bit more stable. We’ve identified a few areas that are causing problems so we’ll be looking into those too.
We’ve also pushed out a few bug fixes for some of the more common errors. Please do let us know if you’re frequently running into anything else and we can try to make sure we’re tackling the most important bugs whenever we do focus on multiplayer.
- If a player leaves and rejoins the same server, placing parts should no longer cause an error
- Springs would often be seen exploding out of vehicles and extending off into the distance - This isn’t completely resolved but should be less common now
- Fixed some rare timing issues that prevented connections
Tutorials
We’ve been working on adding some tutorials in the Prefab Workshop to help new players understand some of the fundamentals of Gamecraft. We realise that these were a little out of the way so we’ve shuffled things around a little and added a “Tutorial” button to the main menu.
Clicking this button will take you to a list of games, similar to the Prefab Workshop and Community Games screens, but with the sole purpose of housing games and prefabs aimed at teaching players all about Gamecraft. We’ll keep adding to these over time and we’d love to be able to feature some of your creations in there too.
Changes to the default saves
We’ve noticed a huge spike in the “Build Guide” that was previously used as a small intro to Gamecraft being repeatedly uploaded to the Workshop. While we’re all for crafters exploring and sharing, we wanted to try and avoid flooding the workshop with exact copies as much as possible. We’ll be looking into other ways of preventing this but for now we’ve moved the guide out of the default saves given to first installs in favour of the new tutorials mentioned above.
We’ve also made some changes to the “create a save” default to make it a little friendlier to work with. We’ve reduced the size of the Grass and Dirt cubes to be a single 3x3x3 cube each, non uniformly scaled, so this will be quicker to delete and will select a more manageable block size if you MMB over it. We’ve also added a third layer of rocks underneath.
Prefab Workshop Part Restriction Removed
When the Prefab Workshop was first introduced it had a slightly different purpose. It started out as a way to simply view creations that other crafters had made, but over time this evolved into a platform for more in depth collaboration and sharing where you could add to, and then eventually edit or deconstruct each other's creations. In line with this we’ve now given crafters full Inventory access while viewing prefabs.
Disabled negative indent tags in HUD
We always love seeing the crazy unintended ways you use blocks and really push their limits so we try to avoid making changes that restrict creativity when possible, like text blocks letting text flow outside of the block. We planned on keeping the HUD blocks relatively strict in terms of positioning as we need them to be consistent across all resolutions. Size, colour and a few other Rich Text tags are fine as they still keep the text where it needs to be, but unfortunately we’re making a change to prevent negative tags being used in the Center HUD block going forward. Positive values are always going to be fine. For now we’re leaving untouched, but we’ll be preventing those in a later update too.
We’re still looking into a few errors and crashes that can happen with certain combinations of tags and are hoping to have some fixes by the next update.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug with inconsistent processing of loops in circuits that include Timers
- Fixed a bug with Physics blocks not having their top speed affected by inputs - This may change some existing builds slightly
- Fixed some visual issues with Bushes and Trees
- Fixed an error when using RMB to move parts to the hotbar - RMB should never have been used for this so it has been disabled
- Fixed some British English spellings of words
- Fixed a bug that caused the ‘drag scaling’ audio to be played when placing any block above the default scale
That’s all for this update, we hope you enjoy the QoL changes and as always we can’t wait to see how you put these new blocks to use!
The Gamecraft Team