Spencer

Happy new Year to all the Hurtworld family, the studio is back at full capacity after a much needed couple weeks of down time. It was a good chance to reset, and get a fresh perspective on where we are at and what needs to be done to bring ItemV2 into the main branch with a bang.

We are still on the same trajectory as I mentioned in the last blog, balancing things similar to legacy with an ItemV2 twist on the content. Infamy being a necessary evil of legacy, that without we have a far too punishing game where you can drop days of farm in a single death, we will be trialing a new system allowing you to keep your gear on death which will work similar to an insurance policy.

Amber Protection

On any equippable item, you will be able to drag amber into the item to put it into a protected state. On death you will drop 80% of the amber used to protect the item, the remaining 20% will be burned and you will keep the item. The item will return to its un-protected state. Any unprotected items will drop on death as normal full loot.

The amber protection cost will vary between items based on the value of the item. We will try to balance things so generally the amber needed to protect it will be around 20% of the value of re-crafting the item. This we can tune at a later stage.

Item Sink

Items without durability will end up accumulating as there is no destruction mechanism. This is shit, (think Diablo 3 on release). To solve this we will be introducing the ability to recycle items for a portion of their crafting ingredients (not 100%).

Amber Loot Tables

We will increase the amber loot drops to account for the increased demand and burn rate as we go. We expect this to cause amber to be even more of a currency than it already is, which we are fine with. Having things funnel back to amber gives us some easy dials to turn when balancing out the game.

Next Experimental Release

We will be aiming to finish this build on the 19th, and release it on 26th of Jan with a new version of Mangatang built from the ground up for this structure.

Mils

Merry New Xmas Year! After a good holiday break we are all back with a vengeance! I have a very fun project to get on with in the new year. Can anyone say HELICOPTER?

Yes I’ve been tasked to expand our vehicle range to now include air travel. The design I’m going off is the classic Huey design seen so many times in films and footage about the Vietnam War. Following the style I have created with our vehicles I will start with a frame style chassis as the base, which will then have the ability to add armour panels and other attachments. The current plan is to make this vehicle expensive to run so that it doesn’t become the main mode of transport, we need to keep it balanced with the other vehicles. Right now there is a base frame I am working on which takes a lot of thought as to how it will look and function in relation to the outer panels that will be designed after. I may use this base as a reference to paint some concept art over the top. Should be a lot of fun making this 🙂

TEHSPLATT

Hello, after a bit of a break I’m back into getting these new environment features ready. As you can see in the image below, the top image shows a hill with scene dressing using large chunks of terrain, foliage of varieing heights and rocks ranging from small to massive. These scene dressing props help both asthetics and (hopefully) gameplay. The different shapes and heights of the layers of props break up the sillhouette of the land and give good cover over decent distances. You can clearly see how bare and open the bottom image. I still have to find out a good way to blend between the terrain chunks textures I’m making and the actual terrain splats, we have a blending tool but I don’t know if it’s usable in this situation. I would also like to get through some of the more random scene dressing assets like animal bones, old broken ruins, tree stumps etc. Hand crafting areas of the map is definitely something I would like to try, to give the players some very memorable land marks that also serve as compact areas of specific level design catered towards gun fights and/or other aspects of game play.

Tom

Happy New Year Hurtworldians!

After returning from a refreshing holiday break today I’ve been looking at how our vehicle changes are going to fit into our return to the legacy baseline.

We’ve never been all that happy with how vehicles were obtained in legacy Hurtworld, it was too random and generally too difficult for something so powerful. That might sound a little counter intuitive (ie. shouldn’t I have to work harder to get a more powerful item) but because of the persistence and potential for loss in Hurtworld getting an early vehicle can give you a large advantage that can snowball out of control pretty easily.

With this in mind we want to make it much easier to get a low tier vehicle like a Goat with a weak engine but make it hard to upgrade your engine to a powerful one and find a full kit of attachment panels (these are way more valuable now that they are supplying armor to the vehicle, effectively increasing its health).

To achieve this we’ll be keeping the vehicle air drop beacons we added in the last experimental update round. I’m still playing around with exactly how they are going to fit into the legacy progression, but it will be starting with the Goat at the iron tier and then moving on from there.

Vehicle attachments will be found mostly in town loot crates and sometimes in random air drops.

I’ve also been looking into making the night less pitch black for those who aren’t using the eye adaptation graphics option (if you can run this you really should!) without making it too bright for those who are using it. No breakthroughs just yet but it’s definitely something on our radar that we want to fix soon.

We know the current experimental build is pretty broken and we want to replace it ASAP, because of this we’ve been talking about pushing to get the baseline legacy build in v2 first and releasing that without the Slug, airdrop and meteor mechanics then working on rolling those out once we’re back to a nice playable foundation. Hopefully we can get something into your guys hands again soon!

Cow_Trix

Heya folks! Hope everyone had a great break over the new year and got a bit of rest and relaxation. Just arrived back, and back into both level building and tool development. I’ll be working on the next iteration of Mangatang over the next few weeks, as well as further building up the level building pipeline. I want to work on moving map development away from having a monolithic central scene – something we experimented a bit with in the development of the Red Desert, but which we need to continue on in my opinion to make it seamless. Optimally we want something where Mils and Splatt can jump into an individual scene that contains a segment of the map, do hand polish or make whatever changes are needed, and then be able to make a new stamp that can exactly replace existing stamps in the scene where everything is assembled.

There’s a couple of things needed for this. Firstly, I’m creating the ability to store the settings used to create a world stamp in a scene. Previously, you had to pretty much just remember the settings with which you had previously captured a scene if you wanted to recapture to reflect some changes or polish. Now, you can set a stamp capture up and save that configuration as an object within the scene, which can then set itself up again. This will mean that it will be trivial to recapture stamps exactly. I’m also implementing the ability for a stamp to capture a road network and include it in the scene. This currently supports packaging up a baked version of the road network with explicitly selected “exit nodes” that can be connected to, and including the entire network copied 1:1. The first use case is probably the more useful one, as hand-polish can be applied to the road network itself. The next iteration of Mangatang will be not centered around a central “build biome”, and will be structured much more along the line of Diemensland than for instance the current, live building biome. We’re going back to the valley and hill formula that has been tried and tested for the kind of gameplay we’re trying to make. Hopefully I will have some cool screenshots to show next week!