Our game is getting prettier by the build! Let’s look at some comparisons.
As usual, you can read the full changelog here.
DELAYS, DELAYS, DELAYS…
If you’ve been following us on Facebook or Twitter, you might remember me promising to deliver this post yesterday. Well, life ain’t always fair and we encountered some last minute bugs and problems with the build, which meant I didn’t have time to write this out yesterday. We were also trying our damnedest to cram in one last BIG feature, but more on that down below…
THE BIG PICTURE
In case you haven’t played the build or read the changelog yet, here’s the TL;DR version of what we’ve got this time:
- One new perk: Extraction
- Re-balanced items
- Completely redone Pause and Perk menu graphics
- Improved player character graphics
- Improved terrain graphics
- Tons of small fixes and improvements
COMPARISON TIME!
With our new and improved graphics, I thought it might be nice to have some side by side comparisons. Here are a few.
Prettier character
Pause menu: old vs new
Old Perk menu…
…new Perk menu
Old terrain graphics…
…new terrain graphics
The new menus are by our newcomer Teemu, the player character and terrain updates by our good ol’ Mikko.
EXTRACTION
A while back we heard feedback from a few testers that they didn’t like the fact that you couldn’t mine Juice with bombs. We thought it would make the game a bit too easy, but then we got an idea: make that into a perk! We also decided to apply it to all other skills as well, which should make the perk even more worthwhile. From now on if you want Juice, you gotta dig it by hand or get the Extraction perk (which we highly recommend).
STATUS UPDATE: BOSS FIGHT
This was the BIG thing we were trying to cram into this build and we almost had it. At the time of writing, you can already fight the boss and see it utilize its full move-set, but unfortunately we ran out of time to finish the job. We didn’t want to delay the build and we don’t like releasing unfinished assets. We still have to sync the animations, do lots of testing and balancing to make the fight fun and of course, give the players a way to exit the level.
All in all, you should see/hear more about the boss fight very soon.
STATUS UPDATE: NETWORKING
Jukka has been taking long strides towards getting our online multiplayer working, somewhat surprising us with his progress. We currently have players moving around, using skills, destroying the environment and even fighting enemies. There’s still a lot of stuff to implement before it’s truly playable though (item purchasing, choosing perks, moving from level to level…), but overall it’s coming along very nicely. Still, don’t expect get your hands on it anytime soon.
UNITY 5.2
Here’s some quick backend news. We updated to Unity 5.2 a few weeks back in order to stay on top of the latest networking updates and there were some positives and negatives. We got better graphics performance with the update (which was good), but for some reason our particles were suddenly moving waaaaay faster than before. We got that fixed quite easily, but yesterday it turned out that the fullscreen mode of our web-build no longer works. The screen just turns black. We’re not 100 % sure yet, but it’s most likely related to the update. How nice.
VACATION TIME!
Last, but not least, it’s time for us to have a week long autumn vacation. We’ll be kicking back and recharging our juices, which means there won’t be any devblog next week.
SUMMARY
Our game suddenly got a whole lot prettier. Having two artists instead of one really makes a huge difference. We sadly didn’t get the boss fight ready for this build, but it’s so far along already that you’ll be seeing it in the very near future. There were a ton of smaller changes and fixes to make this build more than worthwhile though, so get playin’!
Till’ next time folks!
