Year in Review
A few days ago (Dec 21) marked out one year mark in Early Access. Over that time we've improved the game in a ton of ways, improving and stabilizing performance, adding new features, and redesigning game systems to give new players a more stable footing as well as provide varying challenges for those who have honed their skills.
It has definitely been a busy year for QuiVr development, there have been over 360 updates to the game (main and beta branch) since this time last year and 30 pages worth of patch notes since last December (140 Announcement posts!). With an average of an update every day for a year I can only thank the community for being willing to come along for the ride this far!
Some of the notable additions this year have included:
- Procedurally Generated Maps
- Varying map environmnents
- 4 new enemy types
- Redesigned armory system
- New 'Home Base' area
- Updated tutorial systems
- Merging of game scenes to avoid in-game loading screens
- Updated reward system (still working on fixing bugs)
- Improved enemy pathfinding
- Improved enemy collision detection
- Improved map object performance (50% fewer triangles to draw!)
- Improved rendering performance using custom shaders
- Tons of new items and abilities (+ updated effect visuals in April)
- Dynamic lighting system
- New Graphics/Audio/Gameplay settings menu options
There is much more planned for the coming year where we are targeting leaving Early Access. We have already started beta testing out big event tiles and bosses on the Beta branch and once we have enough to create a varied experience they will be migrated over to the main branch.
Patch 0.43.43
Only a few minor changes for this update as most development time this week has gone into the event tiles.
Camera Shake
Added camera shake when gates are closed/destroyed. This is a system that was implemented for the Event Tiles but I wanted to try it out more broadly to get a sense of people's experience with motion sickness. The current testers on the beta branch have had no issue with the current implementation but I'd like a larger sample size.
Oculus Rotation Update
Previously Oculus users could rotate their play space by using the A+X buttons on controllers. This has now been changed to using the Analog Stick on the free hand.