(Showcase of the current state of the game)
Unleash has been released for 10 days - at the point of writing this. Thus, we are still in the very early days, and every day is exciting and brings its own new challenges and joys. The Unleash community is growing every single day, new players are always arriving and we are receiving tons of incredible feedback from our players. You are all awesome!
In order to communicate to our players where we think Unleash should be heading, we have released a proposed roadmap with the major topic points for the next months of development of Unleash. One of the next points on the roadmap is the TD Scenario Editor, which we have begun working on. Another point is localization, which our awesome community is helping us with. We are very grateful for that! Based on feedback from the community, we are introducing some different rules regarding the ‘Unleash’ button for the TD game mode, and we have improved some aspects of the TD UI. Additionally, the game should now run for players experiencing a high ping. Finally, to avoid fragmenting the player base when we release a new game update, the game will now prompt the player to update when relevant.
The Road(Map) Ahead
In the name of open communication with our community we have released a proposed roadmap for the major development points of Unleash moving forward. The roadmap does not cover every small detail, but it mentions the larger topics that we are planning to look into as things stand right now.
(The first public proposed roadmap for the development of Unleash)
The purpose of sharing this roadmap publically is to start a discussion about which features you - the community - want to see in Unleash. We are developing this game for and with our community. By sharing the roadmap, anyone can see what we have currently planned and bring us their feedback on which points they agree with or disagree with, which may ultimately shape the next version of the roadmap.
So bring your feedback to the Steam community forums, Discord and our Subreddit and let’s have a discussion about where Unleash is heading!
TD Scenario Editor … Coming soon(ish)
As has been mentioned multiple times across our Internet presences - as well as in the abovementioned proposed roadmap - we have a ‘TD Scenario Editor’ planned for Unleash. The purpose of the editor is to enable players to create their own Tower Defense scenarios, which may then be shared globally through Steam Workshop. By releasing this in-game tool for TD Scenario creation, we are hoping that the creative minds of our players will come up with new fantastic, challenging, clever TD scenarios which in turn may add to the replayability of Unleash.
(A work in progress screenshot for the UI design of the upcoming ‘TD Scenario Editor’)
We have scoped the first version of the editor and work has begun on the UI design for it. We have not started the actual implementation yet though, so there is still time to provide us ideas and feedback for the implementation of it. Even if we cannot include some suggestions or ideas for the first version of it, there will undoubtedly be updates to it later as well (assuming it is actually being utilized). Thus, this constitutes the first real steps towards (limited) moddability for Unleash!
TD ‘Unleash’ Democratized
In the Tower Defense game mode, there is an option for players to ‘Unleash’ the next wave - in multiplayer, this meant that anyone could ask for the next wave to be unleashed - against everyone! While we think this is fun and potentially very challenging for experienced players, we realize now that it can completely overwhelm new players. Therefore, we have decided to introduce a few different ‘Unleash modes’ for a more democratic approach. Internally, we call these ‘Expedite Rules’.
(The three different ‘TD Expedite Rules’ - different rules for what happens when ‘Unleash’ is pressed in the Tower Defense game mode)
We have identified three different expedite rules, which the game creator can choose between. The new default is ‘Unanimous Vote’ - meaning that all players still alive must click ‘Unleash’ before the wave is actually spawned. This should make it easier for new players to get started, even in multiplayer TD, as they are not overwhelmed through quick unleashing, unless they participate in it themselves. The second mode ‘Majority Vote’ just means that if the majority of players have chosen to Unleash, the wave spawns. The final mode ‘Wild West’ is basically what has been the only option up until now - Any player clicking ‘Unleash’ will spawn the wave. Obviously, these modes only have an impact on multiplayer TD.
The TD wave display UI has also been updated to what we hope will be more intuitive and clear to players. Instead of only showing a counter in seconds, a progressbar is shown to fill up before a wave spawns after pressing ‘Unleash’. Additionally, the UI boxes move smoothly downwards - making it more aesthetically pleasing and hopefully also making it more noticeable than before.
(The UI rework features smoothly animated UI elements and a nifty progressbar)
A final note in regards to the TD game mode is that we are now enforcing a monster cap per lane. The Line Tower Wars game mode has always had a monster cap at 200 monsters per lane, but this was not actually enforced in the TD game mode, which resulted in some unexpected errors occurring - and even if they were handled, it could potentially crash the players’ PC due to too many monsters moving and animating at the same time.
No English? No problem
As can also be seen from the abovementioned proposed roadmap, we had a plan to provide Unleash in localized (translated) versions, at least for the major languages in the world. Thanks to our wonderful community, a number of our players have stepped up to the task of translating the Steam Store page and the game itself into a number of languages.
This means that the work has begun on translating to: German, Russian, French, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, Dutch, Czech and Indonesian! We are still looking for more players to help us with translating into more languages, or assisting on some of the above languages. We are currently especially interested in Asian languages, such as Chinese (Simplified), Hindu, Japanese and Korean, as these are languages that have not seen any translation yet.
The only restriction is that currently the game can only support left-to-right written languages, so e.g. Arabic and Traditional Chinese would be problematic for us technically.
(The language can be selected in the options menu. Currently, we have English, Turkish and the hardcore-mode “Groot” languages available - no copyright infringement intended!)
The first fully translated language, Turkish, is already available in-game. Thanks to ‘Umut’ for providing it! Players can choose their preferred language in the options, and the game should automatically attempt to follow the system language when set, unless another language has explicitly been set in the options.
Slow Internet is Okay… Probably
We have received feedback from some of our players that playing with a high ping (above 200-250ms approximately) would make it more or less impossible to play the game. We have listened, and then discussed how to support higher pings.
First, the reason for why a high ping can effectively prevent playing is due to the network architecture that Unleash is based on. The game runs deterministically on each client’s machine with the lock-step model, which requires all players to be at the same relative point in time in-game. Thus, if one player is too slow to keep up, the player’s input is unfortunately dropped. This results in “rollbacks” being executed - so placed towers never turn from the green silhouette outline to the actual, real structure that other players can see. Obviously, this is only an issue for multiplayer.
The solution we have now introduced is a so-called ‘Dynamic Sync-Window’. At the start of each multiplayer game, the player with the worst ping dictates how far behind the simulation is, which should provide the lowest-ping player with the possibility to keep up. Thus, we are expecting that it should be possible with pings up to 500ms now.
We will soon start experimenting with a slightly different solution technically, although the same conceptually, so it may be that we can improve upon this solution in the near-future.
Game Updates Up-To-Date
Whenever we send out a game update to Unleash, the players already in-game were not notified in-game that there was a new game version ready. Since we don’t allow players to play with each other in multiplayer cross different versions of the game, this could result in fragmenting the player base across two or potentially more versions of the game (e.g. in cases where we need to do a quick hotfix after an update, there could be three versions of the game played simultaneously).
(A version check prompts the player to update the game when a new version of the game is released)
Since Steam does not automatically handle this scenario in any way that we could find, we have chosen to implement our own relatively simple version check in-game so that players receive an in-game notification for the new game version, prompting them to restart and update. This happens when entering the game, not while playing a match, to minimize the intrusion to players.
Closing Remarks
Over the past two weeks we have released a proposed roadmap, which includes the major planned features for development, including the TD Scenario editor and localizations of the game. Several improvements have been implemented for the TD game mode, especially in multiplayer. The game should be better at supporting high ping due to slow internet, and finally the game will automatically check for a new version and prompt the player to update when relevant.
Get in contact with us through Discord, or any of our other social media channels. You can find all of them through our website. Also, you can watch our internal gameplay sessions over at Twitch.
And remember… Monsters never come alone.