Welcome to Silver Sparrow, Optimum Link’s official completion. This update seeks to clarify and enforce the game’s best elements.
What’s New?
- Added 3 new worlds.
- Added Mazes.
- Swimming works now.
- Everything is available in the Create menu now.
- You can hold things now, press [E].
- You can drop Ammo now, by pressing [J], or spawn it from the Create menu.
- You can toggle the HUD on/off by pressing [\].
- You can slow down time by holding [CTRL] + using the scroll wheel.
- You can adjust the size of your primer spray by holding [ALT] + scroll wheel.
- Added profanity filter on chat.
- Adjusting post processing. Game image is now sharper and has less bloom/lens flare.
- Refactored and rebuilt: switching tools, painting, lasers, selecting items, spawning items, telekinesis, damage events, death & respawn, player join, basically everything.
- New sounds for lots of things.
- Improved enemy AI.
- Hitboxes adjusted so players don't clip through walls.
- Interaction range is larger and starts slightly closer to player's feet.
- Telekinetic wave made slightly smaller, but begins much closer to the player's viewpoint, which makes hitting closer targets much easier.
- World lighting on all maps adjusted to handle shadows at a much faster rate. Render time should be significantly reduced.
- Unhooked "Set Design" function (spawns handful of procedurals at the dawn of a server), which eliminates a horrid hitch at the start of entering worlds. There isn't really even a big trade off, procedurals will spawn like normal, but now just starting from nothing.
- Game Machines NPC count reduced. Makes it much less ridiculous.
- More "set" objects and particles, artworks, and audio.
- Now only tools and batteries will prompt a pickup, any misc objects are left to physics.
About Multiplayer
We've found that 1.) a majority of players preferred playing single player, and 2). many players did not find good experiences with random players, and often times connecting to players outside of your region caused issues. In effort to give you the best experience, the game has been simplified to an invite system. Just hit 'Play' and you're good, you're in a game. If you want to play with others, open the Friend/Server menu and invite them. On a technical level, this game's multiplayer was very experimental, and we've used it as a learning experience for our next projects.
Designer Notes
This update comes with bittersweet news. Optimum Link was started in 2015, as a mere experiment. At the end of four years, and with lots of other projects being cooked, the Protoria team has decided it’s best to wrap this game up. We originally wanted this game to have a dynamic lifetime and live alongside future projects, but we care tremendously about the quality of our games - we’d rather focus on one game at a time. Rather than just leaving it, however, we did put a lot of effort into fixing existing problems and giving you some more content. We’re pretty happy to give this game a “finished” sticker, and a good rest as well.
We hope you all enjoy <3
We have a discord, if you’d like to: teleport!
Our next game: Skyfear