More playtesting, more tweaks. We've expanded playtesting a bit since last month, but have not opened the floodgates yet. A lot of our time has been responding to feedback, so we ended up working on a wide range of smaller things this month.
Due to this, this devlog will mostly be notes and random experiments from what we've been developing.
Development News
Since last month:
More work on throwables
More work on lag prediction and optimization
Enemies picking new targets better
Tweaks for melee weapons and cleaving
Lots of work on sounds and how the sound system works, with better ambient sound support
Better UI for the Class Lockers, including nice sprite rendering for player characters
Normalized the male/female heads and added more, so they're a "brother/sister" sort of setup now
Autokicking non-responding players in multiplayer (quitting, computer disconnecting, etc)
Further work on player customization, including UI support
Heatmap mechanics for things like pathfinding, reducing sound repetition, and later things like grenade throw decision making
More work on space ants, including new death animations
General gameplay balance tweaks
Various bugfixing (not ants)
Started some new enemies, though waiting on fleshing them out more
Some player customization experiments, like two-tone hair coloring
Things we're doing currently:
Better feedback for the player getting hurt, right now they don't flinch much
Some more work with the throwable system, such as more weight classes and better physics
More scripting/text event system testing and implementation
Fleshing out the Mission Picking system
Finishing up some last things on Crew setup and tracking
Notes and Experiments
The next few gifs have a crosshair bug where it gets stuck as the green spinning "headshot!" crosshair. We fixed this.
We halted work on changes to the system for how players go through enemies. Now you get slowed down a tiny bit if you try to go through an enemy, but we were still experimenting. We ended up pushing this back until a little later, as the current system works pretty well now anyway. Zombies are dangerous as-is.
You can dodge them by walking if you're careful...
But if you're not careful, or there's a bunch of them, or the corridor is narrow, they will hit you. Currently it takes 6 swipes.
We did some art tests for new monsters. The GIF near the top of this post was for a new Cultist faction we've been thinking of.
Here's the glurms, a new early pest enemy we were playing with a bit as a break.
We've been wanting to do a "stalks you in the dark" enemy for quite awhile now. Still coming up with ideas for it, but we like how it looks.
Above is our experiment with two tone hair coloring. Every hairstyle could have different color zones. This also means we can properly do things like SHORTS now, that inherit your skin color.
We also talk about how we should do color picking, every once in awhile. Right now, we can just do HTML color codes. I was thinking swatches instead, but maybe we'll have some way to make custom colors by inputting HTML color codes. An unlock, maybe?
Here is another experiment. High tech glowing hair. We have a lot of ideas for cosmetic unlocks, to show off your mastery of space and space plumbing.
Next Up
After we wrap some things up, we are shifting work to two big remaining systems: Throwables and CYOA Events. We're going to continue adding people to the Playtest, until we start really opening things up for bigger numbers and new ways to get in.
Next Dev Log will be on April 24th. I intend for it to be mostly notes on Playtesting. I'm hoping to start doing longer videos, instead of just GIFS.
Thanks for reading! You can discuss news as we post it in the #future-preview channel of our Official Discord, and on the site formerly known as Twitter.