Spencer

Hi All, The last few weeks we’ve switched gears a little bit as we focus on solving some quality of life issues and bugs that have been around for a while. I’ve also personally been spending a lot of time working on cleaning up the community and liberally brandishing the ban hammer for those who would seek to ruin our community. In the early days of Hurtworld my philosophy was let anyone do or say what they want, let the community run itself. In hindsight I don’t think this was the best choice, it only takes a few bad eggs to ruin things for a large amount of people as well as soak up a disproportionate amount of my time and energy. Since adopting a zero bs tolerance I feel much happier interacting with the community. Sorry it took us almost 4 years to figure out!

Next patch plans

We are now working towards exiting early access. This isn’t going to be a normal monthlyish content drop and will take a little longer. First things first we are working on ironing out any long standing bugs that don’t belong in a completed game. Secondly we are working to smooth out the new player experience and remove any roadblocks that cause slightly less patient people to bounce off the game.

Achievement / Tutorial

This will come in the form of something similar to minecraft at this point. Mapping out the tech tree and giving some guidance on what new players should be working towards next, each step giving the player an achievement. This sort of thing really isn’t my Jam, but I understand in the current age of spoon feeding, lots of players feel lost without it. Everyone will have the option to disable this at any time.

First Base Setup

One of the most difficult things to get done when starting Hurtworld is getting your first 1×1 base online. This can be a challenge even when you understand the construction system not being killed while getting your stake up, doing this while also trying to figure out how the menu works wouldn’t be much fun. The basic plan is to have a shack like deployable that throws down a 1×1 using the build system with stake in a single click that can’t be placed over build cell boundaries. Price would be the same, would just smooth out the risk curve a bit. Along with this I want to try disabling construction outside owned build cells for normal construction pieces, then creating some new scaffolding pieces that can be placed in unowned cells for building onto rocks / raiding. This should eliminate noobs setting up their base wrong, getting their base wiped and complaining to me that someone teleported into their base without C4. Another option for neutral cells would be requiring people to throw down a cheap temp ownership stake that basically says “Yes I realize this isn’t my normal build cell, I still want to build here”.

Rocket Launcher

The main new feature rolling out with this patch will be the rocket launcher, a non homing RPG type launcher with (probably) various types of rockets that can be used to bring down mozzies, raid bases and blow up other players. This is the first new weapon animation set we’ve created since Dazzler left a couple years ago. Opening us up to more new animation based equip in future.

Optimization

There is still a bit of work to do on optimization, one of those things is investigating if re-enabling forcing dx11 feature set 9.3 is possible without adding exploits, the aim is to get back to legacy performance by our early access release.

Inside rock detection

Recent addition of detecting players inside rocks have been proving fruitful dealing out 20+ perma bans in the last week. If ya don’t know, now ya know. Cheat or exploit = ded.

Release date

We don’t have a concrete date for this patch, we will be aiming for the 26th of September

TEHSPLATT

Hello. Finished another town this week, wanted to go back to basics and have a semi-simple layout. I always try to make each town feel different in terms of how you move around it, that might mean a lot of jump puzzles or you spend all your time trying to climb and get up high or the map has a bunch of different routes that allow you to use your knowledge of the map to out manoeuvre opponents. Sometimes, you just wanna go back to basics haha, so even though this has it’s fair share of accessible rooftops, the way it plays is much more like a typical FPS map. Which essentially means, be smart with your positioning, make sure you know your escape routes in case things get too intense and most of all… git gud. You can see here, the process from rough sketch to clean layout sketch to final town. Usually there’s a grey box step but I used parts from the previous town so the grey box and final didn’t look too different. There was a whole lot of other sketches of different ideas and layouts that lead to the final version but they are far too messy for anyone to understand. The goal now is to make sure there’s no duplicate towns in any individual biome. Also, there’s a handy loading bay at the back of the town for you to park your slug when unloading heavy slot items for the Crafters.

Mils

So I just got back from an epic holiday for the best part of a month. Back refreshed and relaxed and jet-lagged as hell 🙂

Can anyone say Rocket Launcher?! So I’m jumping into a Rocket Launcher design that is based on a few different existing Launchers. I get to be a bit creative with this one which will be a fun project. I’ll be trying to keep the design in line with other real weapon designs so that it looks completely functional and therefore feels like it might actually exist.

This is harder to pull off than it might sound but I really enjoy trying to create something where every part is as lightweight and logically engineered as possible.

Below: An early grey boxed low poly mesh. This will possibly get changed but looks decent so far.