This week marks the beginning of sprint 39 and we have a lot planned. Our goals for the next 30 days include finishing the game trailer, adding posters and other unique touches to buildings, improving performance, and updating the drone. We’ll also be working on adding more new audio, improving older features, implementing a crash logging system, and updating the map in preparation for our first set of players. The main focus of this sprint, however, will be completing our player construction system and closing out gameplay features.
The team did a lot of work already this week on the building system. We’ve added health and damage values to construction attachments so players can huff and puff and shoot other player’s building projects down. We’ve added a destruction feature and are working on recycling so players aren’t stuck with design decisions that they come to regret. We also added a door feature that will automatically close a door after 5 seconds. A great feature for those worried about flies or mutants getting in the house when you’re going in and out frequently.
We also update the number of AI in the game by a factor of 10 to test performance. It was a great, and ultimately short-lived experience. Spawning into a pack of wolves with a couple of bears hanging around the edges provided valuable data on a player’s ability to escape a dozen sets of teeth and game performance numbers while you’re being mauled by a crowd. It’s a little too bitey for our tastes right now, but it’s going to be fun to figure out how many animals and other AI work best with X number of players.
We have many improvements planned this month. We added controls to our normally autonomous drones a while back to help get shots we needed for the game trailer. While useful, these controls took a while to get the hang of as you can see from this video of unnecessary zooms, tree bumps, and ground crashes below.
Our XFX AMD Radeon RX 570 RS giveaway is still going but time is almost up. The contest ends this Sunday at midnight (EST). Head over to our contest page and enter to win before time runs out.
