Hi all,
The second Heart&Slash weekly update should be up anytime now on Steam's servers. It's taken a little bit longer than usual (hours, really) because this week we are attending MadridGamesWeek, a videogame tradeshow in Madrid where we are showing the game to hundreds of people who didn't know about it.
But it's not only showing. By watching so many people played the game over and over, we have identified many new bugs. More of that at the end of the update, but this is actually very good news!
Anyway, back to this update. This is our second Steam update, and there are several new features content and bugfixes I want to talk about. Please note that this update has significant code changes made on the game that might make it less stable than the previous build.
1- NEW CAMERA:
This is, I feel the most important change in this update. There was a nasty bug (basically a system design mistake carried over from the initial prototype) that made the camera update at 30-40 fps, no matter what the real fps of the game was. The issue came from our code updating logic (things that matter) 40 times a second, but updating visuals (things that don't change the behaviour of the game) as fast as we could. But the camera was tied to the logical updates, not the visual ones at it should.
This is now solved, and the game now runs crazy smooth when high framerates are attained. I think this looks very good indeed! But the change affected many systems that had also to be changed, and it has probably introduced many new bugs. This is the main reason this build might be less stable than the previous one. And why bugs that before seemed to not be there appear now. So yes, please report everything weird you see, specially related to movable elements (like elevators and lasers) that were also changed to accommodate the new camera.
2- OVERWORLD:
We have also introduced the overworld of level two (called "city"in the menus). Please note this is NOT EVEN CLOSE to how we figure this section should look and play. On the visual side of things, the city still looks way too sparse for us, with the floors in particular being devoid of detail and decorations. On the gameplay side of things, enemy waves, distribution and progression is not implemented yet, so it feels really chaotic and, honestly, not nearly as good as the rest of the game. However, all rooms are now in game and working, so most of the heavy load is done. But what's left is probably the most important!
We will spend the next week iterating and improving on this section of the level, and hopefully next Friday you'll be able to play something way closer to our vision.
3- BUGFIXES:
This is the list of bugfixes since last week's build:
- XP Pickups don't go to player automatically (now they do)
- Minimap appears over "Scrap part" button
- Guns impact particles delay simulation until in camera (now they don't)
- Linebackers lose focus (now they don't)
- Clockwork hands seem not to reset the effect once a level is finished.
- Guns have problems with broken lifter in special area in sewers
- Player can get stuck between doors in the COP special areas
- Performance - Change CC to LUT table
- Rocketbody can get you stuck beneath lift
- When levels fail to be created, the player spawns in the void
- Morningstar vanishes
- Equipment icons not present when reaching level 2
- Clockwork lens icons
- Hammer special attack
- Avoid three room loops when connecting doors
- Limited number of nodes evaluated for pathfinding
- Colliders pass for level 1
- Reduced number of rooms per section in level 1 by 1/3, increased difficulty per room by 2
- Adjusted weights of first level lifter and giants to increase their occurrence
- Arenas and sequences force time scale of 1. Fixes issue with Clockwork arms
- Fixed mold room
As you can see, it's a fairly comprehensive list that addresses most (but not all) of the bugs this community found. Next week we'll keep working through our outstanding bug list!
ON PERFORMANCE:
Now, I want to say something about performance. There have been a couple of performance improvements in the last build, but there has also been some changes (the camera being the most important one) that actually might have improved "perceived" performance, while diminishing real one. Overall, you should see the game running 4-5 fps faster than previously, but we are not sure and want your input on this.
Performance issues on the game are twofold.
The first one is logic performance. Basically the game code. This is right now mostly restricted to pathfinding issues and major bugs. In the first level, there's little performance degradation in small rooms even with 8 enemies on screen, but it becomes slightly noticeable the larger the room. We need to do a LOT of pathfinding optimizations, but we don't want to tackle that yet, since it's a big task. These performance issues (bugs and pathfinding) will improve as the game develops. Basically, if the game drops a LOT of frames when a lot of enemies are on screen, it's probably this issue, and it's probably fixable.
The second performance black hole is rendering. Basically, since we are using Unity's rendering and camera's, we have little control over this, except for optimizing the art assets we use. this is an issue right now, since some rooms in the new overworld are obviously not optimized enough. If you notice framerate drops on certain places, regardless of enemies around, you are probably seeing this problem. Please, make an screenshot. Knowing when this happens to most people will allow us to schedule and prioritize art optimization.
Also, the optional screen post processing effects we are using are very expensive. Specially ambient occlusion. That requires a hefty graphic card, and you should disable it if your performance suffers.
The good news is that on optimized areas the game runs on a quite wide range of systems, so we thing eventually we will be able to lower our system requirements. But for the time being we are leaving them as they are right now.
NEXT WEEK:
As I was saying at the beginning of this long post (I should make them shorter), we have discovered a lot of bugs during MGW. While many are trivial and easy to fix, the sheer number (around 40) along the still unfinished state of the new overworld, has made us rethink our next update. Originally it was going to be a minor iteration on the overworld and the integration of a tutorial (that would have doubled as our first "story"section).
However, right now we think bugfixing and making the overworld as fun to play as level 1 takes priority, so we are pushing the tutorial back and use next week to update this update into something more solid and (hopefully) fun.
If we manage to fix most of these bugs, we will have a much more solid experience from which to keep building the game.
Let me know what you guys think!