Here it is, a long time coming, our first major update and our first big update this year!
With most of the bugs from release squashed, we finally were able to turn our attention to one of the features we felt was most lacking - animation. One of the biggest complaints we had was a lack of range of motion, particularly in the boat, which made it feel like you were forced into a certain, cramped perspective.
That in mind, we've spent the last month completely overhauling the animation and reconstructing the way you hold tools in Loch Ness. The result, we are very pleased with. On top of new tool poses for every tool in the game, we've also added:
- New animations for picking up tools, which change based on the relative location of the tool
- New rowing and braking animations which fit our boat asset much better and actually allow for more responsive boat turning.
- New walking animations including strafing and walking backwards
- Foot IK
Of course, it's not all been about animation, and over the last month we've been fixing many more bugs, such as:
- Hopefully fixing the tool dissapearing glitch for good
- Events/scares should much more reliably replicate from server to client
- Dramatically increased the area in which you can find evidence
- Player will now move out of the way of the screen when playing Pong
- Finally fixed the right oar braking or unbraking glitch
- Can no longer trap other players
And finally, we've added a slew of new features, including:
- Several new achievements, with many more to come
- A 'give up' button when you are drowning in case you know you won't be saved
- New audio and music
- Many new scares and events (no spoilers!!)
- An extra feature and achievement for a certain fan favourite easter egg
A lot of this, particularly the animation side, is what we wished we could've included on release but, because of time constraints and other limitations, never could. This is also the case for our next two major updates - which will be an overhaul of the sound and a big update to Nessie's AI and animation to make her much more formidable.
After that, we are very excited to get to work on new features, including an economy and exploration update, as well as two additional Nessie types. For more information on our plans for the future, a more detailed list of our changes and if you want to give us feedback or report bugs, please do feel free to join our Discord or check out our Trello board: https://linktr.ee/LochNessGame