Dear Wastelanders,
It's been an incredibly challenging two months for us since our last update and we wanted to keep you up to date on the latest developments in our little studio.
Upcoming Content and Challenges
As promised on our store page, the following features will be added in the next content and systems update:
- Revised Dialogue System that changes other character behaviors.
- Balancing Difficulty.
- Light Camera Movements for Dialogues.
- Mac and Linux support.
Besides adjusting enemy health pools and adding lots of new items to levels that are severely lacking like The Junkyard and Gutless, most of these new features required us to do something incredibly challenging, mainly upgrading our Unity client to the latest version.
Since ALL of our 55,000 lines of code were written by a single programmer, Unity has always been used as more of a deployment method than anything else.
Our camera, dialogue editor, combat, animation integration with Spriter2D and essentially anything you see in the game was written from scratch.
We don't believe in flipping assets and just buying other game mechanics from the asset store.
We believe that the end result creates a much more unique gaming experience for anyone who players BUCK.
Since we plan to begin porting BUCK to both the PS4 and Xbox One we had to upgrade our underlying Unity framework to the latest version.
This, of course, broke the game. While Amir is working on getting all the systems back to working order, Gal will continue to expand the game world; adding levels, missions and NPC's.
Revising our dialogue system means revising the entire game experience. Since dialogues control the game's progress, any change to that system will inherently change the entire game.
Not to mention that all dialogues will have to be re-animated, positioned and structured.
This is by far the biggest system change we ever had to implement.
The new dialogue editor will be added alongside a complete overhaul to all the current missions and level structure of the game. These are huge changes to the core game experience.
Another major change we want to make is to the way Save Files are handled. Currently, any update we push erases all in-game progress. We want to make sure this will no longer be an issue after the next update so that any update we push in the future will keep all of your progress.
The next update will have to the last to erase all in-game progress because the entire mission structure is going to be re-worked.
Meaning that the first mission you undertake will feature Gutless Gulch and finding Nibbler the Salvager. The reason for that is to unlock the store after one mission, so that you'll have a reason to visit the store and Buck's home before every new mission to stock up on healing items, ammo and even upgrade a weapon or two.
We can't give a solid ETA for the patch at this moment but you can always see us work on the game on our streams or ask us anything whenever you feel like it, we love hearing from you guys ♥
We'll post an update the second we know when the patch is ready for deployment.
While the game is being fixed on Amir's client Gal and Adi are hard at work on adding new levels, characters and cinematics:
Make sure to follow us on any of these so you won't miss a single stream:
This patch will change a lot in the game's code and structure, meaning that any patch after it will be deployed quicker and easier than ever before. We hope you'll hang in there with us and play BUCK when the patch goes live and tell us how all the changes feel.