Spencer

Hi All,

Its been a big few weeks since the 0.8 path go live. Welcome to all the new players from the Steam Summer Sale!

This week we’ve been a bit all over the place hunting down new exploits and spending a bit of time cleaning up the community with the new influx of players. Part of this process was welcoming our first volunteer moderator “klauz” which I’m sure needs no introduction. This is our first step in being more active on our communication channels and weeding out the bad eggs that ruin the experience for others.

The second step to this process much less tolerance to exploits and those who knowingly play with and benefit from cheaters in their clans. If you think one of you clan mates is cheating or exploiting, distance yourself from them or risk getting a perma ban.

Performance Progress

I didn’t get as much done on the performance pass that I had hoped by now. Hopefully next week should free up some more time to crack down on the low hanging optimisation fruit.

Next Patch

We will be aiming to get the next content patch out on Thursday the 1st of August, the main feature here will be the new boat, performance optimisation and hopefully some quality of life changes for new players as we lead up to the exit from early access.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, after last weeks patch I’ve started working on a new town event to replace the duplicates. The plan is to replace all the duplicate events, this is going to be a bit of big job but will definitely be worth it. I’m looking at ways to speed up the process, for example building creating prefabs from pre-existing assets that can be re-used within a specific biome to a create an on going theme. Not for all of them, but just a few, so if you had something like a bandit village aesthetic for a specific biome, then you could use that same aesthetic on a few towns within that biome. They would all have different layouts and play completely differently but they would have similar assets to speed up the process. The new town I’m designing has a very close quarters feel, as it will be in the start desert I want it to focus much more on spears than bows. So lot’s of running through interiors and jumping from roof to roof. It can be difficult making the towns actually feel different to fight in, but there’s still lots of unexplored designs to get through.

This is the draft layout of the latest town. There’s a lot of planning that goes into the routes a player can take and the options to take make different strategic decisions. I don’t like forcing the player down only one route with no options. I always try to balance risk vs reward, if one route has a lot of cover then it might consist of some lethal jumps if another route is pretty close to the capture point then it might leave you out in the open the whole time making it risky, but rewarding if you survive.

This is an image of the final version of this town event. Essentially the same thing but much more polished and a few things layed out slightly better.

Mils

Hey amigo’s! I’ve been working on the speedboat for the last couple of weeks. Introducing ‘The Barra’ (Barramundi) This vehicle is a simple transport craft that will allow players who don’t have a Mozzy (chopper) to get to the islands. This was an issue many players brought up on the forums and it made sense that there should be an alternate way to the islands. This isn’t going to be a personal vehicle that you lovingly store in a boat shed or anything like that. It will be a fairly disposable method of transport, hence it doesn’t have interchangeable panels or skins etc because the will most likely just be sitting on the beach. At least that’s the plan so far. This came out really nice and has a really speedy shape. I have never worked on a boat, so this was an interesting learning experience as with all things new that I have to become at least visually competent with.

P.S I’m off on a holiday for 3-4 weeks see you all back here after that.