Hey everyone! We've got more juicy insights today.
Update 'Heat' & Issues
Originally we planned to do a faster update in-between but we encountered (and still do) some unexpected issues with the Upgrade to the 2021 Engine version. We are on the "LTS" (Long Time Support) branch of Unity which is supposedly stable and fixed but regardless we had 2 very critical issues.
One issue kept crashing when we edited any 'prefab' object in the engine, this is now resolved but another issue blocks us from touching any shaders. These things made us too slow to deploy an update for the summer event.
So we decided to not bring a patch now and continue working towards the enemy update.
We re-evaluate every week and let you know when we know. What we are working on or planning to do is unchanged however. (More details in the "Focus & Enemy Update" section)
Environment Upgrades
Right now we are making quite some environment improvements.
Most of the changes are of artistic nature but in varied cases get new volumetric fog, cloud shadows, better lighting, reflections and more. As Synthetik 1 changed drastically in environment quality over the development, the same is happening here all the time as you surely have noticed, the only difference is that we are not hard capped here and essentially only limited by our skill level instead of the very hard capped limitations of S1s 2D engine.
A new 'state' for the second silo level center piece (also using our new Styles)
In the next update varied environments will make a good leap, especially the Missile Silo, Power Plant and the Police Academy will get noticeably nicer. This is combination of things, one part is graphical effects, lighting and materials being used better, but most actually comes down to art fundamentals, such as composition, proportions, shapes, negative vs positive space, colors and values (brightness) and consistent use of assets. Gradually improving these fundamentals in the maps can lead to very significant aesthetics improvements without making any new assets.
Environment Styles
All levels gradually get rolled out with our advanced Style & Palette system
Our new system is being used and next patch you will start seeing some of the new environment styles. These can really change the look of each level but we try keep the identity intact.
These do not affect the models but change colors, effects and the mood. At a later point this will also be used for room events, like a poison room or desert storm. Now these are also network synced, unlike in S1 where you could have a different ground color than the other guy.
Above are the styles of the Silo level. Most people use "Diffuse" textures and define their base colors in textures, but we use masks for everything which makes us very flexible in such regards.
Here you see a test for a super heavy desert style or Mars style of the first Power Plant level you know.
This was more of a test for fun but we might add such room events.
Even dark horror styles are possible.
Focus & Enemy Update
We are focusing on quality right now for the next update, improving as many things as possible, especially around environments, enemies, bosses, attachments, shops (and items if there is time) and a lot of fixes - this is all about core gameplay improvements - also we spend more time on internal multiplayer testing now.
The big enemy update has such a long list of improvements that we split this onto 2 parts, the foundation work and the content part. How and if we split the enemy update in 2 is not clear yet however, we'll see how it goes.
New Lightning & Riot-Foam wheel and their destruction pieces
Some few examples of foundation Improvements we want to make:
- Overhaul the existing faction units and improve and tweak every unit depending on need
- Make SAT the base Faction and Chrono Squad the late-game faction (Arctic+)
- Start spawning vehicle units even if stationary for the beginning
- Enemy Alert notifications (!) (?)
- Improve the terrorlevel alert and bring back headhunters
- Start adding rare enemy spawns
- Moving enemies to specific positions (for special events)
- New Wave spawner feature (for arena mode or defense events)
- Improve Entity creation workflows
- Tool-tips for Game Entity variables in editor
- Clean up of Game Entities in editor
- Speed up for projectiles (right now its noticeably easier than S1 as a cause)
- Improved Turret behavior
- Improve map designs regarding turret places
- New Unit-Frame for modders and testing (a window with unit stats)
- New Combat-log for players and testing
- Enemy health-bars showing increments of 1000 hp
- Update all mines with setup-time and a trigger delay
- Improved enemy editor workflows
- Improved group movement
- Improved damaging on enemies
- Animation system improvements
- New melee foundation
....
Of course there are many more things going on, big level improvements and additions, multiplayer and whatnot.
Military Faction?
We are also first overhauling the SAT Police & Chrono Squad factions before we start with the Machine Military faction as we want to focus more on quality over quantity now. We actually already had all the Military models ready for months, but the current ones need work first. In the end, there would be Police and Military alternating, with both having their elite sub-faction appear at the ending levels.
Military Medium Tank spoiler (Saturn 5)
Animator Refactor & Funny melee hacks
Animations traditionally are controlled by a mix of state checks (is the unit aiming or reloading) and blending of related animations (walking animation and reload animations). Right now our setup is too reliant on blend tress. This was easier to use to get a decent result quickly, but for the cost of too much CPU computation time and also restrictions for advanced use cases such supporting multiple melee strike animations. We are in the middle of redoing the animation controls from scratch and already experience much better animation performance while also seeing more precise running animations.
We are also adding some new animations in the near future which could be used for items or other abilities, like a roundhouse kick.
A foundation for a new melee system has also been implemented. This was done as the enemies uses extreme hacks for melee. At the start, enemies had a bullet attached to their weapon, leading to swings hitting targets behind (the swing doing a overhead chargeup animation, essentially the equivalent to hitting a lamp on the ceiling in your living room). Then the next hack was to make melees use invisible shotguns, which swept under the radar until we noticed that you could be one-shotted when you stood point blank due to all pellets hitting. After this, they got a simple AOE damage action, which just does a range check on weapon attacks and deals damage. This works fine but is not a proper implementation as you still have a invisible weapon firing shot, but is at least consistent in hit detection and damage.
The melee weapons are now their own weapon type independent of the existing ranged weapons of th game. This allows us to have a customized setup for them to use "Swings" with unique properties instead of using the ammo based system of the ranged weapons. We are expanding this system gradually and looking into some melee options for the player as well at a later point,
Before we embark further into on such adventures, we want to make sure though that the ranged combat satisfies our expectations. As of right now our priority here is to only make sure we have a well functioning system for NPC units.
Shop Improvements
For the next update we also squeezed some shop improvements in.
This is not a complete iteration but around halfway in and already improves many of the shop actions.
The Medical shop and some of the Gambling and Black Market terminals got a bunch of reworks.
The shops were made when the editor was still very limiting and we were much less comfortable with the tools. Best practices haven't been found out yet and it was generally all too much under pressure, so now these can be upgraded.
Shop roles
After some thinking, the conclusion about the shops was that their main purpose is twofold:
1 - Provide always useful "services" - Like gamble, or get healed, upgrade a weapon etc.
2 - Provide "run-changers" which drift your setup into an alternative direction with perks
3 - Sometimes terminals should provide small "challenges"
So shops are detached from items, abilities and weapons in a way. Right now they try to do everything, from giving an item, to a run changer to a stat upgrade. They also are often too niche and not impactful enough.
However their logical place is within the simple but useful services, and then adding a twist onto the entirety of your build, ideally with an up and downside. Items need to always be useful, class perks are for your class, stat upgrades now exist already, attachments are for your weapon. Shop perks ideally add a twist on everything (or provide a no-brainer always useful service, as the twists might not be what you want necessarily)
Overall they will just get improvements and we are looking for some more special things, like hacking an enemy, or get a medical drone, and letting players have a bit more choices of making the game harder as well. Later we are also thinking about a challenge / alert terminal and or bringing back the quest shrines.
Multiplayer
As mentioned in the last 2 posts, the foundation all works and we are just testing and bug fixing and a decent state is getting quite near. Our networking structure is way above our team size structurally. Its a highly scalable (using server pools) fully dedicated server based system with extreme future proof, you can't really go much higher than this even for AAA standards. (And many AAA use laggy Peer 2 Peer, even for PVP...) We use a completely custom back-end (services, chat, authentication..) and no high level libraries. Currently the servers run over Amazon AWS but we are flexible and can pick anything we want.
This does not guarantee that the coop introduction during Early Access will be painless, but getting the foundation right was very important to us, since we've hit structural brick walls in the past and it is very hard to recover from that once things have already been released. We are still busy setting up all the machines for the live service and bug hunting in the coop. We'll keep you up to date!
Category Upgrades
As mentioned in the previous blog posts, we are following through with the specific upgrades.
The current compositor/pandoras box system is being reworked, from the super freestyle upgrades we have right now, to more specific upgrades based on the category of an item or ability action.
(Grenade, Sentry, Potion/Booster, Summon, Orbital .....)
So each category will get a choice of a couple of specific upgrades for that category.
Like a turret can get a missile upgrade, or grenades get multi-throw, support things can get an aura and so on. We think this is going to be more interesting as you get tailored upgrades to what you need.
Menus & Graphic Design
We are also planning on overhauling and fixing the menu structure.
We want to redo the menu architecture (less so the layouts, like how abilities are displayed) so the management how screens and windows are shown and sorted and everything around. We did not have a clear architecture at the start in mind which really hurt us every time we wanted to change something in the menus.
We think there is a lot of quality we can get out of this angle as well, including better buttons, animations, sounds, particles, screen effects, camera usage, backgrounds and everything around.
The graphic design also went through many iterations but we were never fully happy, now we finally have some refined style we like, and here is the first preview:
Keep in mind this is a rough Photoshop draft and some things are missing or poor (weapon frame)
Finding fitting fonts also took endless hours as they need to have many requirements and also support varied languages including Cyrillic. In general the style was struggling because we had a really amazing 3D-style UI once tested for a prototype and we thought this could be transferred just in sci-fi style but that somehow didn't work out at all. The S1 style looked quite good but much of it was a bit sub-conciously done. It took a while to really understand the rules behind the art as to why some of the things work and don't work in S1/S2 but the code is now 90% cracked.
Another thing we are considering while we are doing the rework, is having more of a walkable menu hub. This would be really cool and also actually help with some issues, but also be some work of course. The tutorial could be extended to be more of the completer home base and maybe you could even invite people to your base or such things, but no confirmation on these concepts.
New Cooling Chambers
Not only are we making all levels much more varied with the style system (and better looking in general) we are also working on new environments, such as the Cooling Chambers environment.
This is an alternative second floor (next to Oilrig and Mainboard) and has 3 sub-levels again.
Not too many spoilers here. This one is going to be very cool and will have that unique Synthetik style, so watch out for that! Coming the next update.
Alright thats a lot and enough for today - we'll keep you updated about when the next patch will hit as soon as our issues are resolved. Have fun!
- Team FFG