Early Access Update 8
build id: 2015-06-26_20-52-32
Hello all! We are happy to announce a new update to Space Beast Terror Fright.
First of all, a note about the build id that shows up at the upper right in the menus. We just figured out that the time stamp is in your local time zone, so basically it won't be correct for anyone except people in UTC+1 (our timezone). Epic fail. I will change this in the future to something unambiguous.
Party Changes
In general we have been working hard on consolidating the local co-op experience with the networked co-op experience. The main goal is a unified experience where your Party stays together across a number of missions, with character progression and statistics intact. Whenever a party is pre-mission, it is logically a "lobby", and is basically the same for local and networked play.
We have split up all the information into Basic and Advanced, with Basic being the first screen you see. We added Basic to highlight the characters that are in the Party, and is focused on showing statistics on the characters that are in each logical slot (red, green, blue, gold). The Advanced screen is more akin to the previous incarnations of the lobby, and here you can set all the options related to mission seeds, difficulty, etc.
In both screens you can now also choose the "class" of your character, which currently only affects the weapon that character will play with in the coming mission. This can be reselected prior to each mission. In Local mode you can also choose the number of players / what input devices to run with, while in Networked mode you see the players that are connected to the lobby.
We have also removed the per-player ready toggles, as this was causing a lot of technical issues with our Steam Implementation. Currently the owner of the lobby is the machine that is allowed to launch the mission (you will see a button) as well as the one that is allowed to change seed and difficulty settings (now in the Advanced screen).
Our hope with the Party / Lobby changes is to limit the amount of information that a player is forced to deal with in order to "just play the game", and also prepare for the addition of even more user options in the future.
Technically the lobby now stays alive for the duration of the Party. This means that players who are looking for games will always see any given party that is live in the LAN, Steam Friends, or Steam Public lists. The state of the Party will be displayed as "accepting members", "ready for mission", and "in-mission". It is currently only possible to join a Party that is accepting members (in the pre-mission state).
Character Changes
Sadly with this update we had to wipe all local character information, as that format changed a whole lot. For Local Play the logic is still the same, with a party of four characters that is always persistent. With the Basic / Advanced Party changes you can now also see the current rank and stats of your characters prior to the mission. As before, whenever a character dies it is moved to the obituaries list and a new character is spawned in the party to fill the empty slot.
The Network Play parties are created once a network game is started, are stored in the lobby, and persists for the duration of that lobby (remember that lobbies now stay alive between missions).
In LAN mode the lobby is a small server that runs on the machine that started the Party, so in that case the owner of the lobby never changes and the Party itself requires that the creator stays in the Party for the character information / stats to carry over.
In Steam Friends / Public the lobby lives in the Steam backend, and the ownership is able to migrate between players independently of who initially created the Party. This means that the character progression will live as long as ANYONE is left in the lobby / Party.
Both Local and Network play characters, upon death, will be logged in the local obituaries list. This includes ALL characters, so if you played in a network game and someone elses character dies, it will be logged to your local "list of the dead".
In-Mission Networking Changes / Issues
The main in-mission networking scheme has not changed in principle for this update, but we have added the ability to run the networking while the game is minimized / in the background without stalling the game for all other players. Note that this means that a network game is always running in the background, and your player is obviously at risk in this state. The game will still pause for everyone when any player is in the escape menu; currently this still looks like a red SYNC / stall situation for other players.
Note that we do not currently have a completely robust solution for players aborting out of the mission. If any player does this, that player is kicked out of the party altogether, all the way back to the networking menu, and the network subsystem will be shut down for that machine. This is to avoid the case where some players in the party are in the mission while others are in the lobby.
The effects of this are kind of broken at the moment and also vary between LAN and Steam; we have seen the game sometimes stall and sometimes even transparently switch to local co-op mode when the network goes down (which is kind of cool but also very disorienting). This is both a logical design issue (what to do with the party in this case?) and a technical one, and we will push a fix for this as soon as possible.
The network protocol has now also been compressed further in order to lower bandwidth requirements.
Player Classes / The Shotgun
We have added a very basic "class" concept for players, which allows you to chose what weapon you want to use prior to each mission. The legacy Rifle is still there, and we have added a Shotgun.
The Shotgun evolved from a test of just firing 8 bullets of the usual ammo at once, in a slight spread. We reasoned that if the Shotgun fires the same ammo, it should be reasonably balanced to the Rifle if we simply reduce the rate of fire to 1/8th. The rate of fire for the Rifle has always been associated to the type of ammo that you are currently firing, which is weird but functional. This means that the Shotgun also has varying rates of fire depending on the ammo you currently have.
We think this works just fine. With the addition of some meaty audio, a new HUD model, an adjusted flashlight attachment, a new muzzle flare, and a new targeting reticle, we feel pretty happy with the Shotgun for the moment.
One might argue that the Shotgun is a bad choice in the situations that happen in SBTF due the the slower fire rate versus the constant stream of Space Beasts, but we are kind of reckless at nornware and in any case just had so much fun with the shotgun that it stuck. It adds tension to the game, an axiom that is pretty central in our design, and also it adds player choice and team dynamics that are fun to explore.
We fully intend to continue experimenting with other distinct weapon types in the future.
Music
We have been messing around with using the theme from our last video in the menus, and hence there is some of that in the pre-mission and Mission Success screens. This needs some more work, but in general we want to add some more hype to the menus.
Misc
- On request, we have mapped the arrow keys to have the same function as WASD.
- Leaderboards now display the player class / weapon used to attain the score.
As always, thank you for your support and patience,
/nornware AB c/o johno
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