Hey everyone,
We're updating the demo with some highly requested features and quality-of-life improvements. We've been focusing on the full game this month, as you may recall from our previous devlog, but we still have several gameplay changes to mention.
Quality of Life
QOL was one of the big focuses this month, alongside the new content and mechanics. We've refactored the inventory system and added some improvements.
The inventory received the following changes:
Ammo items' size reduced by half
Highlighted cells of already placed items will now appear red
A new sort button has been added to the top right
Item's ammunition text will now rotate correctly with item rotation
We've also added some new options to the settings.
Reduce Flashing Lights
Automatic Reload On/Off
Fullscreen Effects On/Off
Vegetation and Rain
We've made some changes to how vegetation is rendered to make some really cool things possible. We'll highlight the following.
All entities, including enemies, the player, companions, bullets, and creatures, can now dynamically affect vegetation at zero cost to performance.
Grenades can also affect vegetation
A new wind system that lets us do heavy storms with ease.
Watch on YouTube
We've also made some major changes to rain and what it affects. We developed this for future levels, but we've now also brought it to the demo.
Rain will now appear on the camera lens as a full-screen effect. Its intensity is determined per scene. This can be turned on and off with the new "Fullscreen effects" option.
Raindrops themselves are now actually refracted instead of a slight transparency. Now we get a much more realistic and pleasing result.
Rain will now have animated ripple effects on guns when you have line of sight to the rain.
Rain will also now dynamically create droplets on vegetation, with the size depending on the size of the flora.
We hope the rain enthusiasts are proud.
Graphical Advancements and Tech
We have made some improvements to the demo by implementing some of the changes and new tools we've created to help further with development. One of these noticeable changes is a new artistic height fog system. We developed this as something we needed for the level we hinted at last time, but we've implemented it in the demo as well. It allows us to control the foreground depth, coming closer to our desired results artistically. Still a WIP, of course.
Before/After
We've also made some changes to how the first level in the demo is rendered. We now rely heavily on the sky for exposure control, giving the fog more presence in the canopies of the trees. We've improved the rendering of the forest with RTGI. Not only that, but we have increased the variety of vegetation in the first level massively. You should even see the height fog we just talked about.
Including all of that, we now also have flashlight volumetrics. This is a big change that makes the flashlight interact with all of the fog and smoke in the game. Included in this update, RTGI now evaluates all punctual light sources. This means the flashlight can now bounce light in a per pixel nature, as well as the lights in the caves.
Before/After
Gunplay
One of the first things I tackled this month was something I wasn't prepared for. Smoothly transitioning to Aim->Sprint and Sprint->Aim. This was challenging because we hadn't accounted for button states at all, so I had to refactor some systems to make it work, but it's now included and works great. This allows you to interrupt aiming with sprinting, while also being able to disrupt sprinting with aiming. This adds another level of fluidity to the combat.
I've also made some changes that people were requesting
XM4's vertical recoil has been drastically reduced
XM4 and the AK now have more consistent aiming mechanics. This should result in fewer "How did I not hit that?" moments.
The AK's aiming animations for shooting and locomotion have also been changed to better align with the sight. The recoil pattern was also changed to accompany this and affect less rotation when aiming down.
Hipfire recoil is now much more jumpy when firing at range, encouraging aiming in for distance.
UI
We've replaced the title screen with a more finalized version that we're more happy with. To accompany this change, we've also changed the main font the game uses to something that more fits the tone we seek out.
Looking forward
Not all changes are included in the demo. We've fully implemented a scope system in the game to go along with a new weapon, the SVD Dragunov. The scope is a mimic of PiP, with all the bells and whistles you'd expect, but zero performance cost. We are thinking of adding an option for full PiP scopes to really flex our muscles, but it's still under consideration.
We have also planned out a new meaning of progression for the game. Weapon workbenches will likely be coming next month to the demo, allowing you to use new items found around the game to upgrade your weapons.
We hope you enjoy what you've seen so far, and we have so much more to show you in the future. The demo support has been incredible, and we appreciate everyone's feedback; it makes the game better than we could have ever imagined.
Many thanks,
SK Studios