(Showcase of the current state of the game)
Hi and welcome to the 23rd development blog post for Unleash!
The past two weeks have been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster for the Unleash development team. At the beginning of last week, we were optimistic and excited looking forward to the release. Then, the discovery of a desynchronization issue gave us a bunch of extra gray hairs and resulted in several extraordinarily long days hunting down that hard-to-squash bug. By Friday last week we realized that we had no choice but to postpone the release of Unleash. The upside of that was an extra chance to build up more of a beta community, as well as finishing our list of ‘polishing’ tasks, including visual improvements and bug fixes.
Multiplayer Desynchronization
Exactly one week before our intended Early Access release date (17th of April), we discovered a critical desynchronization issue. It broke all our hearts. Unleash is based on a deterministic network architecture. This means that all computers running the game in a multiplayer setting must always come up with the exact same calculations - not a single decimal may be off. Errors accumulate fast and thus result in players seeing things on their screens differently, essentially breaking the multiplayer experience completely. Throughout the process of developing Unleash we have learned that maintaining determinism between players’ machines is hard. An otherwise simple bug can suddenly become crucial.
That is why we couldn’t in good conscience release Unleash when we were aware of a desynchronization bug, which is why our collective hearts broke as we discovered the bug merely one week prior to release. The rest of the week we fought fiercely against the many-headed demon-monster that is desynchronization. Our lead programmer was out with illness the first couple of days, and we have so many other tasks that needed completing before release. As we reached Friday we took a long hard look at each other and agreed that it did not make sense to release the game under these circumstances. Even if it shattered our hearts and brought tears to our sleep-deprived eyes.
This week we managed to find and fix two separate issues, which could each lead to desynchronization. Since then we haven’t seen any desynchronization in our game tests and we are thus confident enough that there are no more bugs that may lead to desynchronization.
Discord Community
One of the positives from postponing the release of Unleash is that it gave us one more chance to try to drum up attention and hype for the game. As a part of this process we are giving out 1,000 Steam keys which are valid immediately, and will roll-over to the Early Access and beyond. Anyone can write us an email (to [email protected]) with a short motivation for why they should be given one of these keys and become a beta tester for Unleash. The best motivations are rewarded with a key. The key is redeemed through our official Discord bot, which requires aspiring beta testers to join our Discord server.
As a result, it feels like the Unleash community is growing - players are chiming in with feedback and helping each other getting started. We love and appreciate all our beta testers and we are so thankful for their willingness to help us achieve the best possible Unleash game. If you would like to join our growing community and help with the development of Unleash, don’t hesitate to send us an email.
Eventually, we are hoping that our community will move most of the longer discussions to our subreddit, which we feel is a more appropriate place for longer discussions. We appreciate any and all feedback and welcome anyone to the Unleash community!
New Spawn Portals
For our latest Early Access trailer we included a new spawn portal, visually inspired by black holes. It took us a few weeks, but the spawn portals have now been optimized sufficiently to be included in-game. This work also included making new spawn particle systems for monsters spawning and ensuring that spawn portals can be color tinted by player colors. The new spawn portals will start their animation shortly before the ‘grace period’ runs out, which marks the time where players may begin spawning monsters.
(The new spawn portals are visually inspired by mystical black holes)
Wardworm VFX
Wardworms have recently new aura visual effects inspired by the Fatquack’s effects. While the Fatquack heals other monsters, shown with green colors, the Wardworm shields other monsters - we decided on a blue color for that. The depiction of shield in the UI is also blue, so the color is consistent and hopefully intuitive. The size of the effect matches the actual effect’s radius.
(The Wardworms have received a new shield aura VFX in blue colors)
Closing Remarks
Even though we were absolutely devastated that we had to postpone the release of Unleash, it may in the end turn out to be a good thing for the game. Releasing a game with a desynchronization issue would obviously have been a problem, and the extra time has enabled us to build up a bit more community, especially on Discord. Additionally, we now have time to implement small visual improvements and fix more bugs.
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.