We had a pretty good week. Mech has been migrated and expanded from Beta. All vehicle cameras have been fixed. We added harvestable ruins to the map, along with making the lost drones harvestable. And lots of other small fixes and improvements.
Also, a lot of people were saying the Experimental Branch was more playable than the Main Branch, so we're updating both builds this week with the latest stuff.
Mech
The original launch version used a Mech system that was driven completely by math. While it allowed for nice foot placement we found that it just didn't have the right look and feel. Through the Experience builds we tried a fully animated system and while that did allow for some further functionality like running and jumping, it still didn't feel quite right.
Our ultimate solution is the combination of math driven IK on top of the animated control system, which gives the Mech a very detailed feel and allows for full control. We even added look-at constraints to the guns, so that the arms now aim at their targets - something that was asked for in the Beta Builds.
Vehicle Cameras
This was an easy one, but caught up to us after the engine update. As many of you know the radar map system has been changed to a 2D system, which allows more functionality and is far more optimal (and we've taken enormous strides to be performant). It turns out the vehicles still used the old camera layered radar which in the modern engine sometimes causes the terrain shader to wig out. So we fixed that.
Ruins and Lost Drones
We sprinkled some drones from the original settlement before the Osiris Missions began (more on story later...) in a past update. Now they are harvestable, which will give you more resources to survive on.
While we were at it we added lost bases to discover and harvest. Not a story element yet, but more something to find and harvest to ease the build progression until we have a chance to do a proper balance pass on the economy.
Lots of Minor Fixes
We had some players on Discord mention some textures and shaders were missing on some of the guns, so we fielded that, along with making sure bullets hit all the enemies correctly (a collision layer change that we missed through the AI pass, apologies). There's a lot of other small fixes too, we'll put these all up in the notes on our website.
Incase you missed it:
Stealth Gameplay
We're getting further afield with the AI and behavior systems, and tuning intricate behaviors is getting easier and easier. There's still more we'd like to add to make the creatures more animated when changing states, but the overall feel is coming along nicely.
Creatures in Mines Now Respect Walls
A weird bug to track down since it only occurred in the build, but we found it. Something to do with the pathfinding graph not registering. Anyway, we fixed that last week.
Additional Notes
In addition to all this you've probably noticed we've been making some changes around here: new store graphics, new library graphics, etc. This is all part of us taking over as publisher and sweeping up some unfinished items. We see this as a new beginning and therefore having a little fun with it: we're calling it Season 2. No, this doesn't mean we're going to throw DLC at you, and no, this doesn't mean it's going to be a 4 year season. It just means we got our game back, and the shackles have come off.
We also updated the website and put up the latest roadmap, so you can see how we're prioritizing our efforts.
I'd love to say we're just getting started here, but you probably won't believe me, which I totally understand. You've been shown a lot of stuff since launch, and it's been a rough road, but I can assure you that any issues we've had throughout this dev cycle have been handled and are long gone.
In the mean time we'll get back to it. Have a great weekend and I hope you enjoy!
Over and out,
Brian