It’s time to suit up and get ready to take to the skies once again. After taking some time to work on our other title, Groove Gunner, we are working on several big updates to Balloonatics that we hope to release in the near future.
We’ll have a more detailed update soon but here a summary of what you can expect in the next few updates...
- Game engine update from Unity 2017 to 2019 LTS, and a rework of many parts of the game to support the new engine features.
- Updates to OpenVR/SteamVR libraries and support for external cameras and mixed-reality rendering. Support for LIV.
- Substantial performance improvements - Multi-threading, physics optimizations, and other changes that will improve the performance throughout the game and allow for larger matches with more players. A higher minimum framerate should also help mitigate performance related motion sickness issues on lower end systems.
After we have that sorted out, our short term goals are…
- Additional performance improvements related to the models and physics of the baskets and fans.
- Fixing some outstanding weapon bugs
- Shader and special effects improvements
- A new match UI (before/during/after match)
- Brand new tutorial system for new players
- Improvements to comfort and accessibility of the game
- Additional behaviors and skills for the AI - bots will be more aware of their own characters’ skills and strengths and be able to better match the play of skilled human players. We will either scale the bot skill level to match the human players in a match, and/or allow this to be selected when starting a match.