I started working on Fulfillments, our in-game achievement system coming with 1.0! Many Fulfillments will reward a new type of cosmetic… HATS.
We’ve only just begun experimenting with hats, but here’s Scrapper wearing a Scrapper hat:
As it turns out, hats are (basically) just gun crabs on a player model. So that’s cool. I also extended our skin modifier system to work with hats. You can’t tell from the still picture, but I’m wearing a spectral scrapper hat which makes me feel important.
And we have a WIP look at the Fulfillment UI:
You know how you have to wait like three seconds for your Blitseg to land after calling it in? It feels like an eternity. An eternity of misery, hunger, and dread. With the next major update we’re making the Blitseg summon instantly. It’s even got a cool new warp-in effect.
If you have a LOT of upgrades you might have noticed some lag when entering a weapon’s upgrade screen or dismantling upgrades. That’s because the game creates a UI element for every upgrade you have for a given weapon, even if they aren’t visible in the scroll view. Why, you ask? Because it’s easier. And recycling UI elements is boring. But it had to be done, and now your many upgrades will perform better in the next big update!
-Liam
I recently decided to upgrade the ambient effects in the game to work in a much cleaner, and more performant way. I had been meaning to add more tailored ambient VFX to the different regions for a while, and that ultimately made an overhaul of the system feel like the best idea. Visual effects are — in large part — about building up the solidity of the game world, making the fake things that happen feel like they are obeying some kind of physical laws. Bullets spark off metal, things still light on fire, rain still falls, etc. As you may have noticed though, prior to this change you could outrun said rain, so clearly I had to do something.
(yes this gif is horribly compressed. but we're limited to 5mb so deal with it)
This new system maintains a static number of particles that always exist exactly where the player is, instead of falling down around the player. Once a particle gets too far, it reappears in a different position at the other side. I wish I could prattle on about optimization and clean design a little more, but the truth is that usually your first idea (even if it’s quite clever) isn’t the best one, and that was the case here.
-Noah