Merry Christmas!
It has been a while since I last wrote a progress report. We have been diligently working on the new version of the game and the Testing Beta has seen several updates the past weeks. Things are taking longer than we anticipated, mostly because we wanted to 'step up our game' if you will. This means improving the overall quality of what we've made so far, as mentioned in previous blog posts, which takes extra time.
So: we're moving the estimated release of the new version to the end of January.
In the meantime you can opt into the Testing Beta, to check out the new version so far and give feedback.
Speaking of the new version, here's the report:
The Infection:
The infection is slowly becoming functional and we're revising a lot of things, especially the monsters.
With the new animation system we are able to make the monster animations and player vs. monster interactions more scary. The way the infection works has been revised too, making the infection source and the monsters separate entities. This means that you can no longer kill the infection source by killing the monster, though you could try to deter the monster, instead you may have to hunt and kill the infection source whilst being chased by the Hunter for example. The infection source and monster AI are being revised as well, with new and improved pathfinding and behaviors.
The Hunter will get more focus as the main monster that hunts players too and it is getting a whole set of new animations, such as destroying and opening doors or crawling through holes as well as new attack and killing animations, which were lacking in the old version.
We are either going to ditch the other hunting monster, the one that could move through walls, or we are going to give it a more passive role similar to the infection events. This is something we're still debating on, let us know what you think.
The infection types are more diversified in their behavior, having gotten new parameters for the way the infection spreads throughout the ship. Some infection types will infect areas quickly, but spread very slowly whereas others may spread quickly throughout the ship whilst taking much longer to infect it and create growths.
As for the environment: the infection is getting an upgrade visually, making it look much more like the ship and former crew are being consumed and converted. The shaders have been redone as well.
The PDA:
The PDA suit statistics and evidence section have been revised:
As you can see there's a new section for 'Color'. This will be the color of your glowsticks, which has been a requested feature by many as it should make finding your way around the ship and to eachother a little easier as a team. There will be several preset colors to choose from and it will be part of the general character customization.
The evidence section now looks like this:
The Tool and Weapon information sections are pretty much the same, the text has been revised though to give more of an short overview. It should be more readable too now:
There's also a new section in the PDA, for information on the various infection types with their strengths and evidence:
Glowsticks:
The glowsticks now have a proper model and they will have the light color of your choosing once the character customization menu is functional, other than that they work the same as in the old version:
Player Animations and Motion Capture:
All the player animations have been remade, except for the new death/infection animations. We've used motion capture animations and added a lot of new ones for walking, strafing and crouching. There are new animations for crouch-walking and crouch-strafing as well, which the old version lacked.
The third-person player model will have facial (idle) animations too, to make the characters look more alive. The new face model(s) have already been rigged for this.
The rigging of the player, along with the model, has been revised too to remove some of the old jank.
We've bought two Xbox Kinects and are working on a motion capture setup, so we are less dependent on manual labor and third-party animations. This will allow us to make better custom animations for the infection monsters and player.
The Tool animations have also been remade, Tools are now attached to your spacesuit to make it a little more realistic visually and to allow players to see what teammates carry.
This will mean that (big) Weapons will not fit in the inventory and thus may have to be carried and dropped, depending on if something like the Chiller actually fits. This is still something we're debating, let us know what you think about it.
Level Generator:
The level generator has had some more bugfixes and changes. It should no longer fail to generate a level and it now has different ways of generating the different ship sizes, so a small ship will always result in a small level and a large ship will always be large.
There also was an old bug that made the infection spread speed depend on the ship size, making the difficulty level all wonky too. The way the infection is updated has been changed to get rid of this issue.
The ship sizes have changed to Small, Medium and Large to reflect the changes in the level generator.