Voice Chat
I spent a few days this week working on voice chat! We actually tried to implement voice chat prior to our early access launch but it didn’t really work out… there are very few vc plugins that work for both Unity and Wwise (our sound engine), and the one we tried broke the entire game. So that sucked. But we had much better luck this time around.
Discord has a new(ish) SDK for games that want to integrate text & voice chat through the Discord backend. The best part is you don’t even need a Discord account to use it. If you don’t connect your account, the game connects you to Discord with a provisional token (basically creating a temporary account that gets deleted when you close them game). Whenever 1.9 rolls around, you’ll be able to voice chat with other players in your lobby!
Upgraded Mission Select
The mission select is getting an aura upgrade. Now once you zoom in on New Atlas you can orbit around the entire moon. Missions are scattered all over it. It’s cool. Hovering over a mission shows more info in the popup so you don’t have to click all the way into it.
As part of this change, we also want to put all missions in the same place - so Ouroboros will be part of the main mission terminal and can be found with the other special missions like the Overtime Assignment.
Starrunner
I spent a weekend making this little arcade game for the HUB. It’s singleplayer but fully networked so you can watch other people play it and take over if they pause.
A Look Inside Skins
Ever wondered how we set up skins? Here’s a peek at the editor for adding skin modifiers after the textures are made. Each modifier enables its effects on the gear shader if a random value derived from the skin’s seed is less than the modifier’s chance.
-Liam
Sit Emotes
More character animations are on their way! I’ve been working on new sit emotes. Each character will have a unique flair animation that goes into an idle loop. My goal is to really bring out their personalities - Scrapper’s sitting animation is goofy and carefree, while Glider’s is more graceful and demure.
-Seungmi