Mils

The Mozzy now has it’s first body kit. This turned out nice and consists of 5 parts. Front Panel, Roof Panel, Left Side, Right Side & Tail. Now these will get passed onto Tom to implement with the rest of the Mozzy’s Chassis. I’ve started on the skins/designs for the paintwork now too, and I have a tonne of ideas, so we may end up with a lot of designs depending on how they work out.

TEHSPLATT

Afternoon, this week has been an intense one. Started added in all the town events using the map tools and after climbing up the learning curve for hours upon hours I eventually got something that resembled a map. It took a ton of iterations but I got something out that was playable, though it had a few bugs. The map tools have their ups and downs, they do a lot of things well but also do some weird stuff in their current extremely early state. We’re pretty close to having a nice quick map creation work flow in Unity but it definitely needs it’s kinks ironed out. Building maps can be a very long and tiring process, the constant back and forth of building, testing, re-building, re-resting etc. takes its toll. I tried to go back through and rebuild the map from the ground up using the biome specific stamps so that nothing was hacked together but due to previously mentioned kinks, that all went south pretty fast and we had to revert to the original map that was released and then manually change that. I also made a quick scroll world item for the item naming system.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians, this week I’ve been fixing bugs and working on our item upgrading and crafting systems.

For the recent patch release I worked on fixing amber protection for your sleeper, this was a tricky one to track down as everything appeared to be working correctly from the killers end (The loot dropped would contain 80% of the amber protection cost as expected) but the protected items wouldn’t appear when logging back in. This was because after the sleeper was killed the protected items were still inside the sleeper inventory which would destroy all its contents when it was destroyed. Even though we had written the items into the player’s save those items didn’t exist anymore when it came time to load them. We couldn’t move the items into the players inventory either as that only exists when the player is actually logged in, instead we moved to a solution where we spawn a ‘ghost sleeper’ with an inventory to hold on to these items until the player returns.

I also worked on fixing camera smoothing on automatic vehicle perspective changes, fixing shigis in the starting desert dropping the wrong loot and fixing the low level of detail bush billboards not being properly alpha culled (leaf textures would appear with a square green background where they should have been invisible).

Since the patch released on Friday I’ve also worked on a fix for spears doing way too much damage when thrown plus helping to track down the issues with the ‘Servo Wars’ town capture events, these fixes should be going out in a patch later tonight (or are probably out now by the time you read this).

Other than the bugfixing stuff I’ve been working on the next iteration of item upgrading. You’ve seen a rough, early version of this in the most recent patch with the pickaxe attack speed gems. Our plan is to massively expand our range of item upgrades and offer upgrades to most equippable item types across many stats. Applying an upgrade will be worth a certain amount of upgrade points and each item will have a limit of how many upgrade points can be applied.

We’re also going to overhaul crafting, more items are going to become upgrade items like the pickaxe where the base item is part of the material cost to get the upgraded item. As well as this we’ll be transferring your item upgrades from the base item to the upgraded item so nothing is lost (unlike what’s currently live where upgrading your pickaxe will wipe out all the gem upgrades).

We’re also going to be making some other crafting changes I’m sure you’ll be happy about, removing crafting times and allowing you to craft multiples of a recipe at the same time (multiple crafts might not happen for the next update as it requires ui changes but it’s definitely on the way).

As well as the item upgrades I’ll be taking another look at item customisation and allowing players to find and equip their own masks and colors, we’re still in the process of fleshing out exactly how this is going to work so I should have info about that in the next dev blog.

We’re aiming to do the next major experimental release on the 15th of March.

Spencer

This week I’ve been looking a bit further into the future as our experimental branch gets a bit more stable, looking at what we have on the roadmap to implement that will fit well with our current direction and prioritizing development.

Features we plan to get into the game before moving experimental to the core branch:

– Refactor how respawning works

– Flesh out item stat modifier content

– Item / Gear / Vehicle customization of colors and paint masks

– Helicopter

– Slug

– Heavy slot loot

– More World Event Types

– Multiple iterations of map polish / handmade areas

– Rare creature variants

– SDK Documentation / Release of our basecontent mod source

This seems like a lot of work but most of these features are mostly implemented and just need shuffling balance wise to slot into the current metagame. Our main focus here is not trying to change too much in terms of balance, and phasing in new features slowly to ensure we don’t end up too far from the mark.

Once we officially release the Experimental branch we will make an effort to increase our player base once again. For now we are happy with where things are and appreciate the core playerbase that has helped us get this far and provides good feedback each update.

My priority this week is the new respawning mechanics, then I will be moving on to help Tom flesh out item upgrades. That, bug fixes plus a map update will be the majority of next patch going out on the 15th of March.