This week's devlog is a little light in terms of new content since both of us had to be away from home for a couple of days, but don't worry, I'll be working through the weekend which means that in the next week's devlog we'll see more new content added!
I'll most probably work on the village placeable set this weekend, which I promised last week, so that is something you can expect to see next week! :)
Please, join us on our Discord if you'd like to discuss game changes and additions. All feedback is welcome!
- Teo
Boat Travel
Teo
You can now fast travel between outposts and other locations via interacting with the new boat that is located in multiple different outposts around the map.
You can travel to your starter outpost, which is tied to your SteamID free of charge, but all the other locations cost X amount of MK. Traveling to the WIP location called 'Hamari Village' will cost the least amount of MK of all available locations, since we want this to be a central hub where players can find their friends, get help and tools, and socialize.
Every available location displays the following information on the 'Boat Travel' window:
- Location name
- Available services
- PVP / Safe, turret protected
- Coordinates
- Is the location in the snow
- Price
Use this new feature to travel according to your wealth. When you know you enough MK to buy new tools for better money-making methods, find out the vendor which has those tools for sale and that buys the resources you gather with the tool and travel to it!
Swimming Animations
Nilsson
We have the game finally at the stage where we can start to give some love to features that have been the same as when Teo first created them one year ago. Swimming never had its own animation but the player character would just walk in the water. In my opinion, this worked surprisingly well but it's was now time to create dedicated swimming animations.
Animations are created inside the engine to make it easier for implementation. Teo also added some nice sound effects. Check out the quick video below.
Chat command: /Roll
Teo
Players can now generate a random number between two integers, by default 1-100. This is useful if a member of a group of equal players wants to claim something—such as a chest or a rare plant—they will roll for it.
Players can roll a random number using the following slash commands:
"/roll" returns a number between 1 and 100.
"/roll 50-200" returns a number between given min. and max. values, in this example 50-200.
Getting Started Guide
Teo
Since there is no info anywhere on what you should do in Longvinter, I added a new button in the main menu for beginners that opens a window that tells you what to do to get started in the game. Will be updated frequently to match the questions and problems players will have once we have more people playing the game!
Quality of Life & Localization
Nilsson
During this week I focused a bit more on playing the game and finding different problems and bugs. We had a bug where one of the functions that were responsible for switching the player stance when the player started aiming was not set as network reliable and this caused the gun models to flicker and not be set visible.
There were a number of other bugs fixed, see the list below!
Fixed bugs
- When the player unequipped the fishing rod after catching the fish the fishing rod would reappear in the player's backpack unintentionally.
- The bird AI would not reset its walking destination after it had been killed. This would cause the bird to walk in weird locations after it respawned. Fixed this by resetting the target destination after respawn.
- Fixed a bug where inventory would become unresponsive if you would right-click(drop) item in the crafting menu.
- Sometimes player would shoot itself if the network connection was bad.
Localization support!
The Unreal Engine has a simple built-in feature for detecting translatable text in-game, which enables us to add different cultures from translators. I just had to convert a couple of item names to use the "Text" variable and this auto-generated the files that can be used to fill in translations. If you are interested in translating the game texts for your native language please contact us in Discord!
Other changes
- Added a new SMG
- Projectiles now have damage drop off depending on the weapon