We know there are a lot of new people who are excited to jump in the game, but before we welcome you to Lahaina for the first time with a beta key, we want to fix some things first. We are going to take a few weeks to focus on refactoring, persistence, and stability in order to provide the best experience possible for all of our new players before we start handing out keys again. Mahalo to our great testers for not only finding things that need to be fixed but pointing out where our systems needed some upgrading. Here’s a list of the bugs you found that we addressed this week.
Maikowl – UI Text Spelled wrong
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Most of our time this week was spent on refactoring and improving stability but we did find time to squash several bugs. The team fixed an issue with the new compass affecting performance negatively and worked out an issue where pressing Y to respawn no longer worked properly. We found and fixed many player death related bugs including: a bug where player corpses could fall through the world, a problem where a little floating character would be left behind if the player died while switching between perspectives, and a handful or UI related problems.
Even though we are focusing on refactoring for the rest of the sprint, our play sessions are still very important, helping us decide what aspects of the game to work on next and what needs to be fixed. Below you can see a few shots from a recent session.
As we approach the weekend, we’re wrapping up our huge optimization and performance push. The landscape is still undergoing changes as we work on our new distributed foliage system. The backends and game inventory have gone through a huge refactoring as well. The performance improvements should make our testing sessions more enjoyable for everyone, and help us work out any remaining kinks. If you’d like to help us identify and address more issues with gameplay join our discord server and wait for your chance to join the testing group.
We’ve fixed a number of bugs recently including: animation stutters when switching or unequipping weapons, torches that weren’t spawning fire, (which is really the whole point of a torch), and a Peter Pan like issue were characters didn’t have a shadow.
In addition to these bugs, we’ve made a number of inventory and crafting improvements. Players can now affix or detach attachments from anywhere in the inventory. We’ve added scroll wheel logic for selecting items on the hotbar. You can now mouse wheel to highlight an item, and then select it. The team fixed an issue with dragging items getting stuck on screen after tab changes, and fixes a bug with the laser sight making weapon meshes distorted.
Our audio pass continues as well, covering jungle, beach, and building alike. We’ve added footsteps back into the game, so those with a good ear can hear trouble coming. In addition, we’re working on improved audio for bullets and weapons. Soon, players will be able to enjoy the wet slicing noises weapons like these below make as they tear though hide, armor, and flesh. You can see more 3D weapon models on our sketchfab page, or check out our gallery on the media page.
This week the team remains focused on performance improvements across the board, and work on tools and systems to make the game experience as smooth and engaging as possible. First, we tackled houses and building interiors. We’ve reimported all of the houses on the map and improved the LOD on the procedural house meshes to make them more performant. We’re putting on our apocalyptic interior designer hats, and roughing up rooms adding holes, cracks, and grunge to spaces, ensuring a trendy beat-up look to every abode.
Our work hasn’t just been targeted at the indoors however. We’ve simplified the foliage system and added solely the foliage necessary for gameplay temporarily while we work out some kinks. The team has improved foliage LOD transitions and are looking at ways to increase game performance while players are running through our wild places. We added tint to rocks allowing players to see that they contain harvestable ore, and fixed a creepy bug in which bamboo didn’t cast a shadow, leaving you to wonder what kind of supernatural thing was disguising itself as bamboo groves.
We continue work on the drones, improving their eye and decision making ability. While trying to teach them what things are worth recording or following, we discovered that they aren’t fans of mass combat currently. They’re pretty good at recognizing mutants, players, and animals and staying on the tail of a lone player, making their way through the map. However, in one of our play testing sessions, seven players were shooting each other, and anything else that moved, only to have a drone move away to film a nearby deer. We’re working on improvements to make them fans of shoot outs and the bloody fields of combat.
The team also made a number of crafting and inventory updates. You can now move around items in your inventory while crafting, and we added better support for switching between pause menu screens. The crafting screen now puts items that you have the ingredients to make at the top, so players can see what they have, and what they still need to harvest more easily. We also squashed a bug that would leave players unable to unequip weapon attachments, and one that was affecting some world containers not accepting drag and drop or double clicks reliably.
Speaking of world containers, we’ve completed the design to our Alohagistics boxes. Old packages from the crowd-sourced delivery company that promised to “Get There Eventually” will be replacing some of the more generic looking crates and containers over the game map. Below is a look at a stack of well worn packages ready for looting.
The web team started off the week with a bunch of refactoring to help clean things up a bit before continuing work on the achievement system. We have the first iteration, with a handful of achievements almost ready to deploy. Jesse is still working on badges and layouts for the final product, and we looked at some wireframe options. In addition to the the new achievements, the web team is giving the front page a facelift.
Jesse is combining the tabbed navigation into one, separated by headers, on the left-hand side of the page. We’re getting rid of the slides, and adjusting the layout of the front page to make room for callouts, contests, and special game announcements. We’ve updated the download tab and talked about different FRV overlays we could make for people streaming the game. Jesse is designing cover art for us to use on all the major social networks, and we’re giving the story page an update as well.
Almost all of our audio is switched over to Wwise, with only a few ambient noises and sound effects needing an upgrade. Terry and crew continue to work on our weather and water issues. We’ve made some good progress on ocean improvements, but we’re still totally trying to make that perfect gnarly wave dude. Our trueSky updates are still a work in progress, and we’ve had some crashing issues on staging that we’re digging into, but the team is hopeful to have Hawaiian blue skies and a variety of clouds overhead very soon.
We’ve made some improvements to the craftable bow in the game, and listened to a few options for the string being pulled before settling on the perfect twang. We’ve updated the spear throwing and thrusting animations to make things just the right amount of stabby. With all the talk about improved throwing animations, we got a bit side-tracked discussing how fun it is to throw things at Jared in the game, the axe and pickaxe in particular. Jesse shared some fond memories of throwing things at Jared, and seeing how far away he could get while still accurately dropping an axe on his head. We got back on track with news of the addition of a few more shark-toothed (leiomano) items for players to pick up, and hack away with.
We’re making a number of improvements to the existing AI in game, focusing specifically on the next tier of ranged AI. Right now players will run into a few Trophy Hunters who throw things, but with Big Bob and the cannibals being included in the map, we’re working on teaching them to shoot. If everything goes as planned, well have some gun toting NPCs running around and shooting up the place by this weekend.
We’re making some ui improvements, adjusting the opacity of menus and updating the tooltip widget inside the inventory screen. The team has circled back to drone improvements, and are focusing on our pathing issues first. We’re updating the eye-in-the-sky with the new map geometry so the camera will hopefully stop its subterranean explorations. We’re adding some art to fuel cans, health kits, and various items to make them less generic and more Hawaiian, as well as building out the areas around the Thorcon Power Plant.
Lastly, as we build out these areas, improving building performance remains a high priority. To aid in that, we’ve started a large decal library to use on virtually any structure. We have a wide variety of stains, cracks, gouges, rust, and moss that can be added to: wood, brick, metal, plaster, and concrete. Below you can see one of our programmatically generated buildings with and without a number of these decals.
To get the week started we had a lengthy conversation about game videos. We have some landscape and test footage, as well as a few bloopers, but we need to make quite a few more. We looked at what we already have in the folder, and talked about what aspects of the game we wanted to highlight. Putting on their editor hats, Jesse and company are working on a few more videos, and cutting them up to make GIFs. We’ve already shared the “Can Gun” video from a few weeks ago, with most people expressing interest in having it as a weapon option in the game, and wondering how many beans a second it could fire.
We briefly discussed which one of us had the most pleasing voice for doing voice overs, and came to a consensus rather quickly, avoiding a lengthy reality-talent-show-like process. In addition to the GIFs and videos, we talked about creating websites for the larger ingame companies like: Manimal, Duracave, and SSHAM, and what we’d like those sites to look like, and offer players.
We made a few play improvements recently too. We adjusted hitmarkers to make them easier to use, made some enhancements to points of interest visibility on the map, and have a brighter, more noticeable beam showing the location of loot drops in the game. We discussed the possibility of including a basic melee weapon, like a club or rock, in the player inventory when they spawn, so they always have something to defend themselves with. The led to a conversation about punching your way out of, or into trouble, in the game. Chris lamented the lack of a punching option, for when you’ve run out of ammo, and want to feel like flailing your arms around will help.
Jared is finishing up the last round of improvements to the email and notification system, as well as the settings options necessary to support them. We talked about setting up a RSS feed to add to the forums and our Discord channel. We continued work on building out an achievement system, both for the game and the web page. Jesse is currently working on layouts and designing badges while we compile a list of achievement worthy activities like: joining a house, inviting a friend, or filling out your profile.
Terry and crew continue our march towards the upgrade to UE 4.20.2, but the audio transition to Wwise is done, and we’re making the final push on our trueSKY update. We circled back to a few lingering play features that needed some attention like blocking player notifications from the annoying and needy, and various minor weapon fixes. We discussed ways to improve our iteration time, and solutions for NPC voices (see the conversation about pleasing tones and articulation in the second paragraph above.)
One of the team’s main tasks this sprint is improving performance in structures, and building out the game area around the Thorcon Power Plant, our temporary social hub.
That work continues this week, as we focus on adding details to our ruined neighborhoods while being mindful of being kind to your GPU. Here’s a look at a few houses and some roof detail work.
The web team started off the week by releasing a whole new navigation system on the front page. Everything a visitor needs can be found on our much cleaner left-side navigation now. The group did lots of refactoring work and are busy hunting down any new bugs that pop up. Jesse added some new loading animations between screens, and Jared is putting together a heat map, so we can see what areas people are visiting most, and how they’re getting there.
We’re updating our notification and alert system so you can keep up to date on everything your friends and House members do, and a setting to receive virtually no messages; just in case your loved ones are worried that you’re spending too much of your day tracking the goings-on of people you play games with. Jared is working out an achievement system for the website to help users find everything available to them, and explore the various social tie-ins. With Jared busy coming up with an idea for a Friendster achievement, Jesse is working on a few new pre-recorded videos to show on the front page when the drone is down. He’s also doing a little work on a Paddle Creek Games page, for those of you who are interested in learning more about us.
While the web team is focusing on making things better for real people, everyone else has been working on game AI and improving the mutants. They’ve completed designs on a couple new types of survivors warped by the fracture, and are working on their individual AI to make their fighting style and tactics different from the Trophy Hunters.
We found a bug that was making our creatures swarm downed characters and pound them into mush, even if other players were still up and shooting. We can see how it might get frustrating for them to kill someone, only to see that same person again a few minutes later, but we’d rather they don’t spend their time beating a dead horse or player. We’ve also fixed a pathing bug that would send groups of creatures on strangely long journeys upon sighting a player, and keep some from climbing stairs. As you can see from this shot of mutants on top of the Communications Tower, they have no trouble getting anywhere now.
We’re doing a deep dive into our road and village generating system to make sure both are working as smartly and smoothly as possible, while being mindful of possible performance issues. Our campfires now produce enough smoke that they are visible at a distance, and players will now leave dirt footprints in some areas making it easier to see if a place has had recent activity, and which direction those visitors might have gone.
We continue to make audio improvements across the board, from player and creature noises, to weapon sounds, and clangs and thuds when you drop an item from your inventory. With the first pass at our crafting system nearing completion, we talked about making it a bit more complex. We discussed potential new recipes, recycling improvements, and ways we can encourage players to experiment with recipes.
We made some refinements to the map’s loot regions, making sure that players learn they are more likely to find certain items in certain areas, and encouraging them to move about the entire game area. The team continues to work on performance improvements in the Veil Station, building out the areas around the Thorcon Power Plant, and improving the weather. Here’s a look at the tower and mountains with some darkening clouds rolling in.
The team is finishing out the week by focusing on a few ui improvements. Currently, it can be hard to see in the heat of battle what items you have selected or equipped from your inventory. The last thing we want is players mistakenly splashing mutants with a canteen, instead of filling them full of lead. We’re adding improvements to better outline the stuff you want to use. We’re also working on hitmarker improvements so you can line up your shots more accurately, either on the fly, or after a measured exhale.
While Terry and crew continue to manage the UE 4.20.2 and trueSKY upgrade, we made a few improvements to the map. We found some areas are too resource poor for our liking, especially when it comes to metal and minerals. The team is adding more rocks in these areas, allowing players the ability to smash stones until they give up the goods. We also talked at some length about points of interest visibility on the map. We’re making some improvements to better highlight places that are important for quests, might hold valuable loot, are fun to explore, or just act as landmarks and rallying points.
We’re just wrapping up final touches on the next round of mutants to chase players around Lahaina. These gruesome creatures will offer players new types of challenges to overcome, through different tactics and attacks than the Trophy Hunters do now. The group has been focusing on improving ranged AI this week too. We’re improving the tactics employed by ranged attackers like: taking cover between shots, focusing on certain targets, and funneling players into the teeth and claws of waiting melee fighters. After some discussion about what types of mutants would still retain enough of their minds to use complex weapons, we started working on gun tactics for specific creatures.
We’ve been moving all of our audio over to Wwise, and making some improvements as we go. Every area and building has its own specific noises, so those who’ve spent a lot of time exploring could theoretically tell where they were just by listening to the background noises. We’ve made some improvements to reloading sounds, because the noise a shotgun makes while being racked can be a great morale boost before combat, or a warning that something really bad is about to happen. We’ve made some other minor audio changes too, like slightly delaying the sounds of doors, and adjusting the volume of footsteps on different types of surfaces.
One of the biggest projects this week has been making improvements to the loot system. We’re creating all new loot tables based on “regions” on the map. While players have a chance to pick up any kind of loot anywhere, we want certain items to be rare in certain areas, and more plentiful in others. For instance, if you’re looking for shark teeth, you might find them anywhere, but beaches will be the best places to look. The mountains and dense jungle will turn up more harvesting tools and raw resources. Ruined neighborhoods hold more provisions than other areas, and downtown is the place to look for weapons and ammo. We’re also working on adding visual cues to help players see where a loot drop scenario is happening, and adding the same for quests.
Finally, we continue to work on improving performance issues with the Veil Station and our procedural building system. While we’re making progress on turning the station into the future social hub of the game, the team is also building out neighborhoods surrounding the Thorcon Power Plant. We’re still making performance and materials improvements to the automated building system, but as you can see from these shots below, the neighborhoods that we can build on the fly are looking pretty good.
Sprint 27 is here and in addition to covering a few goals carried over from 26, our biggest tasks are: upgrading to UE 4.20.2, speeding up iteration time, upgrading trueSky to fix some of our lingering weather issues, and addressing any bugs from the last sprint.
We made a big push to get our first quest ready to play. Centering around the Communication Tower, players explore the surrounding area fighting off dangers, gathering loot, and completing quest goals. As this picture of the tower with a little morning mist shows, the area is looking great.
However, Lahaina is a big place, and we’re moving on to bigger buildings, namely the Municipal Veil Station, and the Thorcon Power Plant. Being a little bit more play ready, we’re working on building out the areas around the Thorcon. We plan on making it the temporary social hub for the game, and are working on filling it up with useful items for players, as well as making it an interesting place to explore. The team has a few concepts for the surrounding areas, and are working to improve materials for our procedural building system.
The Veil Station still needs a lot of performance improvements before it can become the main hangout for players. We’re working on a number of updates and improvements inside to help performance, while we work on grunging up the exterior to properly represent 60+ years of neglect and encroaching jungle.
We found some of our mutants to be a bit too tough so we plan on balancing combat a bit. Right now, you can shoot so many arrows into a Trophy Hunter that they look like a bipedal porcupine before running up to you, and ripping off your face. The team is going to adjust their damage and health values a bit to make fighting more fun, but still challenging.
We’re making some improvements to mutant models and animations, and are improving the existing AI in the game to help fix a few bugs we uncovered. We’ve upgraded ranged AI to help players take full advantage of natural cover, and all the hard work we put into buildings to hide behind. We’re adding another type of Trophy Hunter for players to deal with, as well as a whole new group of terrors to encounter in the areas we’re working on.
With the new and improved horrors of the jungle to deal with, we’re making some weapon improvements too. We’re adding a number of audio features like reloading sounds, and fixes to attenuation and ricochet sounds. We’re fixing a bug where a players M4A1 will move around independent of their hands. This is a great feature for shooting around corners, but we’re not really into phantasmal riflery. We’re adding impact decals for gunshots to make things look more realistic, and misses will sometimes kick up a little dirt now as well.
Lastly, we’re fixing some social player items and game features too. The ability to block players has just been completed, so you can now easily ignore the annoying or needy with the click of a button. Inventory stacks can be split into manageable piles, and we’re fixing a bug to make sure medkits will heal poison now. While it can be fun and tingly for the first few minutes, nobody likes to stay poisoned for however long they have left. We’re adjusting how far away the sound of jumping carries, and are making sure that all the ammo boxes now contain ammo, which isn’t the case currently. We’re also adjusting how easy it is to see campfire smoke at a distance, so you can provide other players with a live action version of your favorite scary campfire story, or just make new friends. Whatever you’re in to.
That’s it for now. We’ll be back next week with more updates.
This week the team started off by circling back to refine and build out a number of player and social features. We’re looking into ways to highlight our affiliate program, and improve its usability. We looked at how a few other games use theirs, and discussed at some length what would work best for us. This led to a conversation about gifting Kula, our premium currency, to other players, and using it to buy packages or merchandise to give to your friends or fellow House members.
We looked at the House sign up and creation process. Remember, if you want to go fast in Lahaina, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We started a list of House improvements, and other issues we found too confusing in other social aspects of the game. We talked a bit about bundling game packages to make it easier for people to buy copies of the game for their friends, as well as clearer notifications to tell when your friends are online, or playing the game.
Jared cleared out a few bugs on the web page, and dug into some form validation work. After finding a bug with how the forums work last week, we decided to take them out of iframes, and figure out a better way to incorporate them on the page. Jesse finished the design for the ingame shipping/logistics company Alohagistics. Instead of the boring old crates, and boxes found around the map, players will now find a good mix of packages from 2050’s cheapest shipping solution. Alohagistics – Get There Eventually.
We continue to push ahead with crafting improvements. Jesse has finished the last of the wireframes and we just need to hook them up. He’s still doing some rollover work on inventory items, and addressing a few minor bugs. With a little ui polish, we hope to have the first iteration of the system working by next week. We also took a look at our old keybindings, and made a few minor changes to make certain actions in the game more intuitive, while keeping things like shooting, running, jumping, and crouching in the usual places.
After a lot of hard work on our quest demo this sprint, it’s completed and moved from staging to production. Certain Trophy Hunters now throw things at players more macabre than pineapples, and we fixed a bug that would crash the game when a player would throw a weapon. We’ve worked out the bugs with the zipline, so you can now enjoy a panoramic trip from the top of the Communication Tower, and actually stop at the bottom. We’ve: fixed some audio issues, finalized the quest dialog, populated the areas around the tower with loot and quest items, and worked out the lighting as you can see from what’s left of this tiny park near the tower.
We’ve completed models for the next group of mutants to chase and murder players, as well as fixed many of our weather issues (before we upgrade trueSky next sprint), and made a lot of performance improvements. However, with all the work we put into the quest demo, we didn’t quite finish a few goals. We’re carrying over a few things into the next sprint including finally biting the bullet and updating to UE 4.20.2. We’ll have more on that later this week.
As the week nears the end, the team is making a big push to tackle some of our lingering performance issues. We’ve already stripped the entire map of vegetation, and did some major material upgrades to make things less resource intensive, but there are still a few areas for improvement. One of the biggest, is the Municipal Veil Station. The huge building still needs a bit of work to make it the main social hub without setting your GPU fan spinning. We’re making good progress, but the building is one of our largest, and it will take some time to make all the improvements we want.
In the meantime, the Thorcon Power Plant is mostly ready to go. The spacious safe area and social hub has everything a person restored to life over 60 years after a worldwide cataclysm could need. It’s roomy, with plenty of areas to explore, and virtually radiation free. The plant will be the social hub of the game for a while until the Veil Station is fixed.
I say the power plant is mostly ready because we are still having some door issues inside. Wrongly sized, doors that won’t open, and inner doorways that magically lead to the outside are all being fixed this week. All of us have been playing to hunt down any remaining bugs. We’ve found a few new ones including: Guns echoing when you fire them even when you’re not in an enclosed area, sometimes you lose the ability to walk after you respawn, making it extremely difficult to escape danger, and Chris found a group of Trophy Hunters who didn’t seem to mind being shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned, because they couldn’t die. All of these, plus a few other minor issues should be fixed soon.
The team circled back to some crafting improvements, and our work on refinements to the queue layouts making it easier to see what your building, and when it should be done. Jesse is finishing up box designs fitting for our shipping company, Alohagistics. With the tagline, “Get There Eventually” players will soon see many branded boxes across the game area.
We talked briefly about making a trailer, and the best options for an initial one as well as trailers down the road. We talked about some different forum options and improvements as well, and found an inception-type bug that has us rethinking having the forums in an iframe on the page.
After some outside feedback it became apparent that we need to make the wording on game packages clearer, specifically when it comes to the premium subscriptions. Many people thought they’d need to pay a monthly subscription to keep playing the game after the initial purchase, which is NOT the case. The monthly subscription simply gives you a number of, as yet undetermined, benefits and bonuses to your character. Nothing that would make your character indestructible, we hate pay to win games, just things that would make life easier for a player.
With much of the area surrounding the Communications Tower in the final stages of completion, the art team showed off some concept images of the next part of the map to be built. We talked about taking advantage of already existing structures in Lahaina that we could use in the game, places like: water treatment facilities, junkyards, theaters, industrial parks, water holding tanks, and smoke stacks. We talked about which areas would be the most interesting to include and what sorts of things an enterprising group of bandits could do with a smoke stack hideout.
Chris and I have finished the dialogue for the upcoming quest, and the rest of the team is fixing things, and working out any kinks rapidly. We’re seeing updates many times a day as we work to make the scenario as enjoyable as possible. Below is the latest look of what a player will see at the beginning of the quest, when they first come out of the underground respawn area.
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