Hello all,
The team has been hard at work developing 1.15 and we’ve made some great progress. James and Andre have been cracking along on Steam Deck support which includes full controller support, something many have asked for. I’ve spent my time this week designing and placing small container forts around the world. John has worked on animation improvements and chainsaw animations. Below we’ll discuss just a little of what’s going on in this dev cycle. Remember to check out our Changelog for more details.
Steam Deck (Controller Support)
We’re really excited to have the opportunity to work with the Steam Deck. It has also given us the drive to finally wrap our heads around controller support. This is a surprisingly complex feature to integrate into a project that hasn’t been designed from the ground up with controller support in mind. Andre and James have made some great progress and you can expect to see controller support in the 1.15 build.
Container Forts
We’ll continue to ‘fill in’ our map as we move through development cycles. The 1.15 build will feature small ‘fortress’ like structures spread around the world made of shipping containers. These container forts, as we’re calling them, will be the main POI/area for players to find the newly introduced and very fun chainsaw. The forts will likely be upgraded as we move onto future builds and a few more added.
Container Fort Northwest
Container Fort Northeast
Container Fort Central
Resource and Item Combining
We’ve had an issue lurking with item combining for some time now. To break it down in simple terms, the issue was items would combine on pickup. This behavior was intended and is desirable for things like boxes of nails, screws, ammo, etc. As an example, this system is intended to work as follows: the player has a box of ammo in their inventory with 9/20 rounds; they pick up another box of ammo with 11/20 rounds; the player now has a single full box of ammo 20/20 rounds in their inventory. Perfect! That’s exactly what you would expect to happen.
The problem starts with items like fuel cans and actual guns! As an example, you have a revolver in your inventory with 3/6 rounds. You find another identical revolver with 3/6 rounds and pick it up. You would expect to have two separate revolvers. However, the system doesn’t currently function like that. What would happen is, the system would take the ammo from the weapon that was picked up in the world and fill the inventory weapon then discard the second revolver. This is not ideal at all. James has sunk time into fixing this issue and you shouldn’t face anything like it after 1.15.
Chainsaw
Oh boy, this thing is a game changer when it comes to gathering wood for fortifications and well shredding zombies. The team is really starting to bring the features together and we’ve tested initial implementation. How can you survive a zombie apocalypses without a chainsaw? Introducing a new weapon, melee item or tool into the game is a process we’ve tried to simplify. However, animations, drop creation, first person and proxy setups do take time. The chainsaw is currently in our development branch.
Don't want to wait for an experimental build? Join us on Patreon and gain access to everything in this devblog and 1.15 development builds.
Links
Discord: https://discord.gg/survivethenights
Changelog: https://changelog.survivethenights.net
Patreon: https://patreon.com/a2zinteractive
Twitter: https://twitter.com/STNgame
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/STNgame
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/a2zinteractive
Website: https://www.survivethenights.net
Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/a2zinteractive