Firstly..
Bust out the tiny violins for a sad, short song.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been dealing with a new illness that unfortunately manifested itself out of nowhere and has, basically, fucked me up. Thankfully I’m dealing with it a bit better now and can plan my time a lot better. Hopefully this Friday ill know exactly what the problem is, but for the time being I’m able to spend more time on this game, which means you can put those tiny violins away, damnit!
Dash Ability
I originally wanted the movement mechanics to be quite simple, aiming to avoid it turning into a movement-shooter, like gunz or S4-League (although those games were great). That said, the beans needed something to spice up the movement of the game. I knew I didn’t want to add a traditional sprint / stamina bar, so a short, directional dash ability fills the gap quite nicely.
To do it, press shift + wasd and you`ll quickly dash a short distance in that direction. You have full directional control during the dash as well, which means you can dash around corners.
Dashing into players will also knock them back a considerable distance (depending on the angle you hit them at). This can be used to hurl them into a fire trap or into the sea. You can knock back multiple players too if they’re all bunched up together.
You can still shoot and melee someone whilst dashing too. And all the knockback force stacks, so dashing into someone then blicky them with the shotty will send them flying miles.
New Weapons!
Slime gun
The original slime gun (originally the glob gun) was really a placeholder weapon of sorts. I want guns to be unique and not just bullets-with-different-stats. So, the slime gun now fires balls of green slime, that cause a slowing effect if they impact you. The effect doesn’t last long, but during that time your ground movement speed will be reduced. The gun itself also does reasonable damage, though its got a shorter range and now fires 1 larger projectile instead of multiple smaller ones. Im still playing with the balance, like fire rate, accuracy, etc.
Grenade launcher
This fires grenades in an arc that cause a lot of damage in an area on impact. Uses less ammo per shot than the bazooka (3 instead of 5) but care needs to be taken when firing at beans close to you.
Ill get footage of these new weapons and the dash in the next big play test I have lined up. stay tuned.
Optimizations
This is an ongoing task but over the last few months i`ve made a few key changes to how asset loading is handled in the background. This simply means things aren`t permanently loaded all the time which results in some better performance. Besides this ive made a ton of subtle improvements to material shaders and textures in order to keep performance relatively good across most machines.
Update to Unreal Engine 5
This unfortunately hasn’t been completed yet. Right now, the game is fine on 4.26 however there are some key features of 5 that I want to use. I get approximately 1 billion engine errors when trying to update the project to 5 and I can`t figure out exactly what`s causing it. I`ll keep everyone posted about this.
Release plans
I want the game to launch with as many features as I can add as possible. Some key remaining features that are yet to be added include in game chat, team death match, a single player component to the game (at the very least a tutorial level) and a challenge mode with specific unlocks. There`s still a lot of front end UX stuff that needs to be done.
As of now there are 3 maps, 10 weapons and 2 game modes. Also a functional level system, cosmetic unlocks (about 50 or so for now) and character customization.
I will add extra maps, guns and cosmetics during the early access period, and I’ve already got the next map/weapon/cosmetic theme pack planned.
Next devlog will be next Friday.
Don’t forget the join the discord. All are welcome.
Thanks again for following the project