We have been very busy this month. Testing with new players has pointed out a lot more work that we needed to do. Lots of tweaks, lots of optimization and fixes, mostly related to online multiplayer.
This month's devlog will be about some thoughts on the current Friends and Family Playtesting, and what we've learned from stress testing. We're still pushing towards the Steam and Discord Playtests. A lot of our time in February has been about making the multiplayer as smooth and bug free as possible, before we feel good about getting more people in.
Development News
Our work since last month:
Lots of work on the online multiplayer and optimization
Bug hunting
More tweaks to zombies
Work on Event UI
More work on the scripting system for CYOA Events
Some new enemies
A new temporary starting hub, where you can easily pick your mission and preset Professions/loadouts
Work on throwable furniture
More BUGS
More OPTIMIZING
Better NPC conversation system
Things we're doing currently:
Even more online testing and optimization
Some tweaks to melee weapons, and how cleave works
Gameplay balance tweaks, such as enemy health and how much damage enemies do
More work on throwables
Experimenting with different ways to handle players going through enemies. We're not completely happy with what we had
Better optimization for enemies that are far away from any players
More work on lag prediction
Friends and Family Playtest Notes
Right now, missions scale up very quickly. The idea is that testers just see how far they get, without testing being too long.
Things start manageable:
Above is me playing with someone living in Japan. Adding to that, my own online connection isn't great. Things still work well for lag, though we've noticed that things get worse if we add two players. We're seeing what we can improve, but it's looking good as we consider that a good a test for bad online conditions.
Stress testing has put a big spotlight on things we need to optimize. For example, this can get laggy:
We will likely reduce the amount of Skrats that can chase you. But we still want the option to throw really gigantic swarms at you in the later parts of the game.
We need to better optimize things that aren't currently actively chasing any player. The game can handle big swarms, but currently it's incorrectly doing precise tracking for monsters that are further away in multiplayer. So all the Skrats in the rest of the level are also messing with the lag and FPS.
We made it so that zombies have to manually claw you, shown in the above gif. Currently it's probably too fast, and their attack hitbox is too generous. They often can hit you when it feels like they shouldn't. This mostly works right now as they also do very low damage, but we're playing with a lot of tweaks.
Diving is fun, it has some iframes:
We made more enemies than we thought we'd have this early. Many still need another pass at polish and balance. Example, I'd like to change how the Gobber (green orb spitter) Ant attack works, and I'd like to make the entire Space Ant faction way less tanky. I'm thinking they will still tank more damage than the Crab Zombies.
We're also messing with some special characters, though they are currently only accessible by console command.
Also shown in above gif: A railgun snipe by Player 3, in the top left. We still need to do a special animation for zombies hopping counters. I think they should kind of awkwardly butt-slide over them at an angle.
Next Up
Next Dev Log will be on March 27th. It will be a list of what we accomplished in March, and what we've been discovering in online playtesting. I'd like to at the very least open up some Discord playtesting, by that point.
As always, thanks for reading! You can see more frequent news posts in the #future-preview channel of our Official Discord, and on the site formerly known as Twitter.