This morning, iamisom came in with pep in his step and a glimmer in his eye. We all knew something was different. Something big was about to happen. Suddenly, Isom’s mouth opened. Our heart rates went up. Dogs started meowing. Cats started barking. Team Instinct, somehow, now ruled every gym in town. Was this the darkest timeline?
Time and space itself waited with bated breath.
And then, when it seemed like the very fabric of the universe couldn’t take the silence… Isom spoke:
“The plan:
- Ask 'Who wants us to start the 3x Medal weekend early?'
- Listen.
- Do what they tell us.
- Profit.”
And so, we did. And you responded. And we did what you said to do. And it is done.
3x Medal Weekend starts NOW, folks.
Thank you, Isom. He’s not the hero we deserve, but he is the hero we got. Anyway, here's what we're working on this week.
Daniel Haddad, Design Director (Blacksmith)
By day I am working with our awesome team on two upcoming new heroes. The Mystic is up next, and she is looking rather slithery. I’m helping direct John and Mel with their animations to make sure we capture her feel, and I’m working with the programmers as her abilities and towers start to come online. By day, heroess; by night, other things… I’m basically Batman I think:
- Enemy Redesign: I am working on getting the enemy redesign in. Yao is programming their functionality, and I’m going over our new campaign and rebuilding the schedules. So far Gates, Market, and Greystone are done.
- Passives: We’ve talked at length about some of the plans we have for a new and improved passive system. I’m first making an index on all the passives we have in game and categorizing them under: to be cut, to be improved, to be left alone. The ones that are cut will be removed from the game. This is mostly to remove superfluous passives that are not fun. To be improved is a category for passives that are theoretically cool, but in practice are rather boring. As an example, the gold gain passives can use some love. To be left alone is a category for passives that are doing just fine.
- Hero Balance: I’m working with the programmers to try and figure out a way to make balancing our game an easier task. The workflow to go in and balance a tower for example is rather inefficient and a lot of time is wasted and mistakes can happen because our process is not ideal. I’m trying to organize our data in a more intuitive way so that designers can at a glance figure out the specific problems with the balance, identify, and solve easily. Anyone and their mother can tell you something like “Tower X is OVER POWERED!” or “Ability Y is useless no one EVER uses it” -- figuring out why that is and how it should be solved to not introduce more problems is the tricky bit. This is a multi-step process that involves a lot of math, and a lot of talking with the community team to figure out the perception of balance.
Jesus Diaz, World Builder (N3oDoc)
This week I've been doing some visual changes to the Crumbled Bulwark level that should be released soon, which includes finalizing the visual pass and doing a collision pass. Check it out:
Tim Shannon, PS4 and Live Producer (TimmyTrashTier)
After missing last week and getting deleted from the Dev Log like I don’t even exist [Ed. Note: Suck it, Tim], we successfully shipped the Lavamancer update this week and have been tracking the issues with it since then. Our next update is pretty beefy, so I’m trying to bundle all of our fixes into that so we can remove the overhead of hotfixing and focus on making the campaign revamp as low impact on client stability and performance as we can. That being said, if something game breaking crops up, expect a fix.
In other news, we’re working on some updates to the controller that should alleviate a long standing concern with the controller layout, adding look sensitivity, and adding dead zone configurations to the options menu. We also will potentially be adding Loot V2 support for all the new heroes (fingers crossed), a DPS number only mode for tavern dummies, and making it where kicked players will no longer be able to rejoin the sessions they were kicked from (hasta la vista griefers).
Steven Collins, Lead Level Designer (Esorath)
Now that the Crumbled Bulwark has had its makeover, it’s time to start the engines on adding in the gameplay and Incursion.The map now has more character and connection to the world, and the Incursion will reflect that as well.
Brian Goodsell, VFX/Technical Artist (bgoodsell)
Post Lavamancer release, I've spent some time going through and fixing older issues from the past few milestones. Nothing absolutely game changing, but fixing and finalizing things on the backend so it better works with our workflow going forward.
Also working on getting all our content sorted so it lives in the correct place and is easy to find for our other developers. Our cooked game has numerous references to test packages in our content directory, which should be living in better locations.
Then there is the collisions issue that is forever ongoing. Since our characters can now double jump and fly, we've had to revise the way in which we build both collisions and geometry to support things from these views. Forest Crossroads is a good example of why it’s important to properly block your render meshes:
(The red geo should cover the cliff faces. It doesn't do that 100%.) This will be a side project of mine for the next few milestones at least.
Finally working on lighting issues for the new map. Working on separating the player-only space from the lane space using lighting.