Since Steam Next Fest we here at Pow Wow have been working to refine the Stuntfest World Tour based on your feedback and the experience we made with the Steam Next Fest. First of all, thank you all for participating in the Next Fest, and special thanks to each and every one of you who filled out the survey as it gives us a more detailed insight into where you, the community, stand in your enjoyment of our game. We’ll also share the results of the survey with you in a separate post. The idea behind this is to a) show you the overall results and also how we interpret your answers.
Alongside this, we wanted to give you all more of an insight into what's going into Stuntfest’s development behind the scenes and how we’re working on making our game the craziest and most explosive event it can possibly be every time you boot it up! As you will see we want to go also a few steps further and include all of you in the loop on a regular basis.
To help give you all an understanding of how we work, I need to first explain to you how we divide and conquer. In the big picture, while we’re all one big team working on delivering a single game, we actually work in smaller sections so each group can tackle an area at a time so, in no particular order, these are our teams;
Game Mode
This crew is in charge of the different game modes you see in the game (duh!). Every event you’ve competed in is their brainchild. From the races to the target range and beyond, these all started and ended with Game Mode. This team mainly consists of designers but also programmers who support on developing mode rules and level design elements (eg. Jump pads)
Meta
The Menus, UI, servers and beyond! All the bits that bring everything and everyone together is handled by Meta. Making sure you know how much nitro you have left, being able to get from the hub to the garage, seeing the leader board between each event? All Meta.
3C – Character, Control, Camera.
This one kinda says it on the tin but these are the people who create the characters, the cars, and the bits in-between. AI and net code and physics. All comes down to the 3C team. How the game knew you wrapped your car around the post? Because 3C told it.
Sprints
Our teams work in so-called sprints, which are (in our case) 2 week increments in which we commit to certain sprint goals, and after each sprint we assess the results together. In the future we want to give you an overview on what we are planning at the beginning of each sprint and how it went.
Now you know the teams and how we work, we’ll get right to the point. Speaking of which, let’s find out what they’ve been up to this sprint.
This week Game Mode are focused on bringing back the Mini Map with a fresh coat of paint and testing some of the new events in the pipeline, more of which we’ll share in a later dev blog. Reason for removing it for the Steam Next Fest were some performance implications caused by the minimap. They’re also taking the time to clean up several aspects of already existing maps, specifically when it comes to the collectible vehicles which are dotted around. Alongside this, they’re also taking some time to balance the metrics of Crash Derby and Distance Jumps event.
The Meta Team is coming out swinging this sprint with an overhauled menu system, boasting a new style as well as better controller input/navigation along with improvements to the UI and dedicated servers in terms of performance. They’ve also been hard at work with the lore team defining some crucial aspects of our characters and the vehicles from a story standpoint, meaning you may be able to learn more about the competitors and our four-wheeled furies soon! Finally, for those who took part in Steam Next Fest, we should hopefully have a resolution to the pesky failure-to-eject bug in the very near future.
3C have been hard at work this sprint with a whole host of improvements to a huge number of things, this includes vehicle collision and netcode, performance and stability, VFX optimisation and AI. Not only are they making sure to improve the overall user experience for both first time and returning players but, they’re putting the pieces together for some new faces and maybe even a new set of wheels.
We can’t thank the Stuntfest Community enough for your support so far! Steam Nextfest was an absolute blast thanks to you all, it was great to see people challenging each other all across the discord and I had a great time wrecking with the best over the wheels worth of live streams we had.