ZERO DARK Update is now LIVE

Island 359- Update 2: ZERO DARK featuring Trackpad Locomotion, Arcade Mode, (and a T-REX!)

Hey folks, we've updated Island 359 with some awesome new content and features! Hold onto your butts, as this is a huge update for us!

If you’ve been waiting for any of these features below, now's a great time to buy as Island 359 is discounted by 25% during the Steam Holiday Sale!

TRACKPAD LOCOMOTION

By popular demand, we've implemented TRACKPAD LOCOMOTION! We received a ton requests for this feature. It was clearly important to a lot of players, so we added it (in the settings menu!). We hope that fans of this locomotion style can give us some feedback on how we can tweak and tune it to be the most comfortable and balanced experience it can be. It ain’t perfect yet, but it works real good right now. You might push yourself out of the way when you lean over a crate, so be warned (be nice, it’s new!).

ARCADE MODE

We've also added a WAVE SHOOTER MODE (don't grab your pitchforks just yet; we don’t make average wave shooters). Why did we do this??? Well, a few reasons. Yes "Arcade Mode" is a great version for VR arcades to play, but it's also a great way to let your friends play at VR parties. I experienced this first hand a couple weeks ago when my wife threw holiday party for her co-workers at the house and I set up my the Vive. I showed our game like once, and it just didn't lend itself to quick "jump-in, jump-out" play sessions, and it bummed me out that there wasn't an easy to digest, quick-to-learn-and-get-going way to play our game, so that (along with what we see selling in the VR market, and responses to our smaller Show Demo builds), drove home the need for this mode for us.

It’s 24 waves per map (Jungle, Beach, new Valley Map!), and each wave is an Hour that advances the clock. There’s at least 5 different locations within each main map, so really it’s like having…(doing math, hang on) 15 different maps to play on! And then there’s more options on top of that:

MISSION MODIFIERS

Right now there’s two mission modifiers for Arcade Mode: Full Auto and Ranger (machine guns and bow/knife, respectively). We’ve got even more options in the pipe for this coming soon (pistols only, revolvers only, melee only? idk idk)

NOTE: you can’t run around in Arcade Mode just yet. Shhhhh it’s okay we promise you’re going to have a gas playing this.

LEVEL UP!

The creation of Arcade Mode has also laid the groundwork for our Player Profiles and Progression System! As you progress through Arcade Mode, you'll earn credits and level up to allowing you to spend your earned credits on player or weapon upgrades. We will be making these carry over to Mercenary Modes in the near future, but we need to blow out the profile system a bit more before we can do that. The plan is that playing Arcade Mode will allow you to spend your XP on some actual inventory items that you can take with you to improve the Mercenary Mode missions, allowing you to achieve higher scores. You can level up your gun damage, reload speeds, bow distance, health (there’s even a small health regen), etc. There’s more in store for the progression menu options coming soon, but please don’t be upset with us if you lose your progression next update!. Half the fun is in the journey, anyway!

SOMETHING SOMETHING THE KING OF DINOS

Oh did we mention we have a Trex?? B/C WE HAVE A TREX. He's not 100% done, but he's still pretty cool. We need to do a sound effects and animation pass on him, and improve a few behaviors, but he's getting there. Currently he is featured as a boss at the end of the Valley Arcade mode (and we’re not gonna lie, it’s not exactly a cakewalk getting there), but we have a Mercenary Mission that is about 80% done (where a lot of time went during this update) but it's not quite ready for primetime - that will be your premium Rex experience, and we'll try to get that finished up in the next couple weeks. We may also make him an occasional spawn for the Big Hunt and Loot Drop missions, but we need to experiment with that first to see if it’ll work.

MAIN MENU INTERFACE

We've updated the Main Menu to be a bit cleaner and less confusing, we won't force you to play the tutorial, and you can jump right into whatever kind of game you want to play in a few seconds. We really liked the "get on the chopper and fly out" thing to start missions but it was a bit too clunky, so we simplified it a lot for now, and we can look at maybe doing that again in the future.

TIME OF DAY

We’re experimenting currently with Time of Day in this update. Besides wanting to completely break your circadian rhythm, we overhauled the entire game last update, and didn’t tell anyone, to use Dynamic Lights in UE4 for a lot of reasons, but this opened up the door to play with ToD. It’s used in two places:

• In the Arcade Mode, for dramatic effect (24 waves, 24 hours)
• In the Main Menu, if you look up at the sky when you load in you can watch the stars moving and the moon will be trucking across the night sky.

We fully expect Neil Degrasse Tyson to lecture us about how incorrect our night sky is for our fictional location (“That sky is what you’d see if you were in New York in January!!!”). If you stand there for 24 minutes you should see a full day/night cycle. We don’t expect you to stand at the main menu for 24 minutes.

If people like this and we don’t see significant perf reports from folks we’ll probably add it to the Mercenary Mode maps, so that people who are able to play for long periods in one run will get a thrilling day/night experience.

INTERACT SYSTEM OVERHAUL

Interacts have been significantly cleaned up, and you should have an easier time picking up and using things in a natural way. Keep in mind when you have a weapon in your hand that you still need to touch the object with where your hand is, not the gun. We’re planning on tweaking that later, even we sometimes expect the weapon to do the interact.

OKAY FINE YOU CAN SAVE YOUR GRAPHICS

Graphics options ACTUALLY save now - this was announced a month or so back, and we managed to break it in the last build weI made before we uploaded (sorrryyyyyy), and it SEEMED to be working, but obviously we didn't test it thoroughly enough, and we apologize for that. After some rework, it appears to be working as expected. Please let us know if you are having issues with it.

WAKE UP, NEO

We added a "Quit" button to the pause menu by request, as the only way to quit the app previously was to hit the escape key on the keyboard, but why leave VR? So we added that as well.

HANDS

You also have HANDS now. Unfortunately it's more difficult than it should be to tell exactly which controller is left/right in Unreal. We're doing a check at the beginning of the game, but if your hands are crossed it messes it up. I've added a "reset hands" button to the settings menu, which you can use to reset your hands to their proper settings. This is temporary until we can find a more seamless solution.

FEEDBACK

We added a lot of new features to this update, and had to rebuild a lot of systems from the ground up.

We're looking for your feedback on the new trackpad movement - how's the speed? Should we reduce the acceleration? Are you able to do most of the things you want to do with it? Does Arcade Mode feel balanced? What can we do to improve the experience (don’t say multiplayer as we’ve heard that takes at least a week)? Swing by the Community Forum and leave notes in a ZERO DARK feedback thread!

Some KNOWN ISSUES that we are working to remedy: