Aprils progress and what's to come:
Howdy everybody I'm Fury, I just want to say first what a pleasure and honor it's been to work on the derelict team for one. Also I'm happy to announce that we've gotten lots of much needed things covered and finished over these past few months, in our personal lives and for our game.
We've been working day in and out to bring our game to life and I'm happy to see our hard work paying off. All for your patience and support, it means so much to us, thank you.
This past year has been crazy and filled with lots of twists and turns for everyone. I'm glad to see 2020 off and I hold lots of anticipation and excitement for this one. Anyway let's get on to the progress we've made over the past few months!
Weapons and their Mechanics:
We've been really trying to fine tune our designs and mechanics of a wide variety of guns for our players to enjoy. We've designed (an infinite amount of modular, upgradable) weapons for everyone to choose between depending on their playstyle. Shotguns with powerful short bursts, Assault rifles with pinpoint accuracy and high damage output if that's more your speed, and my personal favorite the submachine gun class with a nice damage output and feel for my playstyle personally. Each weapon starts at a base, and is upgraded to have an individual feel different from one another, so pick your poison and let's get out there and kill some Dross!
As well, each weapon has their own icon, stats, variables, etc. These are displayed whenever the weapon is placed on a workbench for upgrading, as well as displayed on the players HUD.
Props and items:
The world level is created via code. This places procedurally generated rooms inside the world. I'm really happy with the progress of this bit particularly. These rooms are all linked together with many hallways and corridors. These take the same art theme of the room we've been designing for awhile now, industrial rooms have industrial corridors around them. The rooms are populated with many destructible physics props, as well as a bunch of key items.
Props have articulation based on what the prop is,for example; office chairs spin, lockers have doors, and spray paint cans have lids that the player can shoot off. These individual parts have durability, mass, and permeability stats. (this affects how much or little the bullets velocity, damage, and trajectory are changed when piercing through the object) I've really enjoyed talking through ideas on how we can make the world more fun for our players, and I think implementing items in our game being destructible was a pretty cool idea!
We hope that all objects act and reach how they “should” in a realistic way. Well continue you improve and revise as we continue developing our game, and any feedback that could help our progress would be much appreciated. :)
Optimization:
Level props only load when they are visible to the player, so this allows a lot of physics based objects to be in each area of the level.
The world itself is split into large chunks, and only the chunks of world around the player are loaded. These chunks load and unload as the player travels around the map, allowing the map to be incredibly large.
All these Optimizations have brought the framerate up from roughly 60, to well over 120 FPS
Also, the player now spawns into this created world, merging the level generation and the player movement, which were previously separate.
We plan to get enemies spawning, and to add an objective (get to location or finish a task), in our demo. We look forward to getting all this content out to the public as soon as we can.
Our goal next is to have the level creating a small floor, with an objective on the floor. For example, the player must find the elevator, and by one of many ways, get it moving to the next area, surviving hordes and trying to finish their task as quickly as possible.
In short, the demo for our roguelike game should be out soon, were working out how to develop a demo currently and the progress goes well. The weapons are all up and working, and they all have stations where they can be upgraded and placed. The map is almost 100% ready for use minus a few tiny kinks that need to be sorted. We really appreciate the time and support of you, our players for your continued help, support and criticism so we can continue to improve our game and turn it into something everyone can enjoy.
Thank you all so much for your time and I look forward to the next update!
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