Hello all, sorry it’s been so long since we last had a devlog but there’s been loads going on here, and I have the memory of an old boot. So what’s been happening? Let’s summarise with with some classic bullet points:
New level from the mines area of the game.
New chucker skins and types (Sludge, Fire, Ice, and Rock).
New chucker puddle effects (I’ve mentioned the new effect method before) for Fire and Rock.
So many bug fixes.
Preparing the new build for release in the next couple of weeks (I know, finally!).
Preparing for our kickstarter campaign (yes we’re doing one of those too).
So, there’s a new level in the next build… This level takes place in the mines on the ship (the ship is so big the crew mine it for resources); this particular level is probably going to be the second level in the mines. There is still quite a few enemy types missing from this level (and the mines area in general), but the new rock Chuckers are here at least (the Chuckers are going to have a large rewrite of their behaviour in a future build). We’re really looking forward to your feedback on this new level, and your help in balancing it.
Jon has completely repainted the Chuckers’ skins to better fit with the game’s art style, so there’s a new skin for the old sludge type Chucker, and there’s skins for the new fire and rock type Chuckers (guess what they chuck?). We’ve decided for now to remove the sludge chucker from engineering and replace him with the fire chucker as his orange skin and fire fit a little better with the engineering aesthetic. We’ve also tweaked the chucker’s behaviour a little bit, gone are the reloading animations as they gave him too much down time, and the impact marker is gone too, we’ve replaced these by tweaking the Chucker’s time between throws, the distance they can throw, and by making it so that they can only throw whilst on the screen (so no fire grenades hitting you from off the screen anymore).
To go along with the new Fire and Rock type Chuckers are the fire and rock puddles. The fire puddle functions similar to the sludge, only this one won’t slow you down and it will deal damage whilst you or an NPC are in it. The rock “puddle” is a series of rock spires which erupt from the ground and deal the player and NPCs damage. We’ve also made it so that all puddles can be destroyed by the weapon charge shots and by the player’s grenades too, so now you have a way of clearing them.
Ah the bugs, so many bugs… And the worst thing is I am responsible for creating all of them! And then I have to fix the damn things too! So, creating a new level revealed a litany of bugs and poor design choices in the level control classes; one of the major ones we found pretty quickly was spawners not added themselves back into the list of available spawners, so eventually enemies would run out of places to spawn. Another bug was the if player one died or quit then all the spawners would shut down, so rooms would become impossible for the other players to finish. I could go on (Chuckers spawning in the floor, Chuckers spawning in the air, Zombies spawning in the walls, enemies not being counted when they died, and we found a lot of collision issues too), but I think we’ve got (most of) them :p.
So we’re finally getting a new build out to you; this has been a long time coming and we’ve been wanting to put this out for months, but sometimes there’s a lot too do. But it’s finally ready and we will have it out to you in the next week or so. When we put it out we’ll do a full change list, but here’s a quick preview:
New Level – Mines
New weapons
New weapon system
New room control method
New spawning method
Refined Infected Ai
Refined Chucker Ai
New Sound effects
New Chucker types
New Chucker puddle effects
New health systems
Explosive barrel tweaks
Also, we’re ready ready to launch our Kickstarter campaign for You’re Doomed, we’re putting quite a bit of effort and time into this, and it should be ready to go about the same time as the new build, which is nice. We’ll have some more info for you on this soon, but after putting £50K of our own money into this game we just need a little help to get it over the line and make it the game we want it to be.
Alright that’s it from me, see you all soon and have a great weekend!
Jules