Hey guys,
Let's talk about some progress.
Visual Improvements, Wall Optimizations
Following up from last month, we wrapped up our work on the game's visuals. The new outline algorithm we were working on ran into some unexpected engine bugs. While we could fix or work around those bugs, doing so would have taken an indeterminate amount of time. Given that it's a relatively minor feature we decided it's not worth putting in what could well be multiple weeks of dev time at this point and went with a stop-gap fix to Godot's built-in outline shader instead. It's hardly perfect, but fixes the most glaring problems with the default outline and will hold us over until we can put some time towards addressing those engine issues.
Walls and floors received some visual improvements as well. Previously every wall mesh was rendered individually, leading to missing corner pieces, performance problems and other issues. We've overhauled the way walls are rendered. They're now calculated as one solid mesh per section, meaning we can calculate corner pieces dynamically to account for intersections and save potentially hundreds of draw calls, reducing CPU load significantly.
Map Gen, Loot and Asset Expansion
This month had us mostly finish the expedition map gen. Our generation algorithm now supports several types of road and parcel placement, allowing us to generate a variety of points of interest with procedural layouts. Lootable items are distributed dynamically through each parcel.
To support our new map generation, we expanded our library of buildable assets with new types of walls, floors, roofs and furniture. This provides parcels with more visual variety and gives the player more freedom when constructing their home base as well.
Coming Soon: Combat, Factions, Events
With base building and expeditions more or less established, the final piece to complete the game's core loop is combat. This month we've completed the basic framework for combat, implementing melee and ranged weapons, projectile collisions and the required animation systems. With the foundations in place, we are now working the medical system: tracking of individual hit locations through hitboxes, bleeding, death, etc.
Combat requires enemies to fight against, and so the NPC system is getting some love as well. We've implemented a new archetype system that allows us to specify starting gear and items for NPCs. The placeholder faction system was replaced with a more extendable framework that allows for different NPC factions that may or may not be hostile to each other as much as the player. To use these new features we're in the process of adding a dynamic event system that can periodically trigger various types of events, from wandering scavengers and raiders to abnormal weather conditions.
Release Date and Roadmap Progress
We've locked in July 21st as our release day. So far we've been making good progress and hitting milestones according to our timetable. If everything proceeds to plan, we should have most of our Early Access features complete before the end of June, leaving about 4 weeks for dedicated QA and polish.
That’s it for today. Until next time, stay safe and keep surviving!