Hello Chosen Ones,
Last weekend we took part in a local event that's why we didn't make the update on last Friday and postponed it to today.
THE EVENT
GIST - Gaming Istanbul is an annual gaming show held in September every year for some time now. This was the first time we participated as an exhibitor and it was a lot fun. It was nice to see Good Heavens! attracted lots of visitors with its unique visual style and having a polished demo was quite beneficial.
It was a big motivation for the team to receive all the praise but we also collected lots of feedback and good good memories.
Here are some pictures from the event.
With the help of the event, we surpassed 12K Wishlists on Steam, yay!
Let's talk a little about what this new update brings.
FULL VISUAL UPDATE FOR EVERGREEN
In our last devlog, we mentioned the updated look of the animals on Evergreen. We went a little further this time and updated almost EVERYTHING.
This includes the appearance of the player character. Now we start the game with our PAJAMAS! Making it a bit more consistent with the intro animation.
Please let us know in the comments how do you feel about this new look.
A NEW DUNGEON LAYOUT and NEW TROLL CAMPS
This new dungeon has a different surface entrance than the first one and it's a simplified version of the first dungeon layout. We will probably introduce different layouts in the future.
We also updated the troll camps with new assets and added a few more variations which you may not encounter all of them in a new world as they spawn randomly.
LIGHTING UPDATE
Lighting in the dungeons is still in an early stage but we made lots of improvements for the light calculations, light radius and intensity. There are interactable wall torches in the new dungeon and you will probably need a light source in order to start exploring. You can interact with wall torches while having a torch in your hand to light up the environment.
We made some fixes to lighting in the Ant Queen Lair as well.
The lighting in the dungeon is a precursor of what will happen during nighttime in the surface world.
BACKGROUND WORK and UPCOMING CHANGES
We removed A* Pathfinding Project from the game since it wasn't optimized for an open-world procedural game. We are still using the same algorithm with our own optimization. We gained significant performance boost while doing so. This required going through the behaviors of all creatures and there might be some untested instances in this update. We would like to know if you encounter some weird behaviors.
This was quite an important update before the multiplayer feature and it was part of the big multiplayer update.
We also made some changes in the way we generate our islands. This was more of a design/balance requirement. Having monsters around the starting zone was bothering players and distracting them from crafting/building the initial items.
Also we wanted to distribute resources a little unevenly so that players will know where to go to find a specific resource/creature. We now have safe/normal/danger zones for biomes and cities always pop up in the safe zone while boss lairs pop up in the danger zone. We will distribute other resources and point of interest after some testing. THIS FEATURE IS NOT YET IMPLEMENTED but it will probably available on our next update.
One final note, due to some of the above changes you will not be able to load older game saves in this version. We are sorry for that. ːsteamsadː
FULL PATCH NOTES
- Evergreen visual update
- Player appearance update
- Pathfinding update
- Uncollected items be removed after 2 minutes
- Ant Queen Lair light fixes
- New dungeon entrance
- New dungeon layout
- New Troll camps
- New trees material updates
- Light flicker fix
- Better light calculations
- Interactable lights
- Light bug fixes
- Equipable torch light
- Fix a bug causing protect step NPCs to not spawn
- Disabled teleportation out of dungeons, fix other teleportation related bugs
- Fix an error in UI navigation, causing volume change on player movement
- Fix a bug causing combined quest steps to not show on tracker
- Fix tech unlocks not working properly on game load
- Fix pathfinding of some NPC behaviors
- Move monster drops to their relevant scenes, fixing an error occurring on re-entry to dungeon or boss room
- Fix a bug causing chests to break on filling the last slot
- Fix a bug causing vendor transactions to break quickslot containers
- Improve quest giver UX, by removing indicators if there are no available quests at the moment