Happy Halloween! Last month, we had intended to show off our progress by letting people play TF2C in the Open Beta. Obviously, that plan hit a bit of a snag, but after a few "calm and collected conversations," we're back to business. This time, we have the last two months of progress to cover instead of the usual one. Here is the current state of the game.
Currently, every gamemode is in the port and working. Almost every TF2C exclusive map has been ported, with the remaining 3 simply pending a recompile. Every weapon is implemented, fully functional, and presentable, with the exception of one animation bug with the twin barrel. Four-Team, with its new dynamic teams system for mappers, is implemented. Lighting changes are fully in effect, and all planned achievements have been ported. When we gave a similar run down back in May, this content was simply "functional", but often had serious bugs, missing visuals, or other faults that would make them not shippable. Now, this content is all borderline complete. We're not done yet, however.
Volunteer projects like this are very prone to what we call "bottlenecking", where a sizable portion of work is required but only a few people have the skills needed to complete that work (applications are always open, by the way). In our case, this is the user interface. We are working towards a much needed revamp of our main menu and server browser interfaces. While they aren't yet presentable, our goal is to improve the flow of starting a server and finding community servers.
The fun thing about doing a massive bug sweep on the game is that it makes smaller bugs more noticeable. "Bug Whack-a-Mole" is what I have affectionately called the process of knocking out a series of small or annoying bugs, attending that weekend's playtest, and leaving with a new list of bugs just as long as the first. The good news is that very few of them are serious gameplay issues anymore. The bad news is that a small bug does not equate to a quick fix. So, some of our developers will be buffing these out until launch.
There are a few other miscellaneous tasks left, such as colorblind mode, some tweaks for custom weapons, the chicken, and achievement feedback. Oh, there's also the ███████, but I'll have more to say on that later. For now, we'll move on to the more exciting stuff.
The game is finally at a point where we can test balance changes without the data being completely unusable. We've already mentioned in the past that the Huntsman and AA Cannon have new hitreg systems, but a few other items have also been reworked since.
The Rejuvenator was the last holdout for ported weapons by a large margin, only getting in towards the end of September. The reason? This weapon was pretty overengineered. In the old version of the game, the Rejuvenator had a whopping five separate factors that could wildly sway how much healing it does. Not only was this a nightmare to try and port, it was also unclear to players and messy to balance. So we're reworking the healing calculation. In the Steam version, the Rejuvenator will focus a lot more on landing direct hits, and its healing will be a lot more consistent when landing direct or indirect hits.
Back in May, for our final balance patch, I heavily tweaked the Mine Layer with the promise to do a deeper rework later due to pacing issues. A large number of mines can be tedious to remove and they often slow down the game, especially if used by multiple Demomen. Now, that rework is finally in development. Our current plan is to ensure that mines are interesting to fight by expanding the options for counterplay, and we're pretty close to succeeding. Once we have mines that are actually fun to engage with, we'll tweak the stats accordingly.
VIP Trainyard tends to get repetitive after a full session, as many maps with short round timers often do. To give the BLU team more of a fighting chance, and to lower the amount of time spent in the setup phase, we have introduced a lives system for permadeath VIP. Now, when the Civilian walks into a sticky trap that you totally called out in comms, he will still have two more chances before the round is over. To complement this gamemode change, we've also updated the map's visuals to introduce more detail and bring it in-line with our current visual standards. Here's images of the new version, with the old version to compare:
With the introduction of custom team combinations, we wanted to further refine the aesthetics of the YLW and GRN teams. To achieve this, Flask has gotten a complete facelift. For long-time blog readers, we teased this in a post on our website a while back. Each corner of the map will now lean further into its team's aesthetic, while still retaining the layout and feel of the original map. Oh, and here's another comparison for you:
When we announced the ███████ last month, we were under the impression we could sort it out in due time. Unfortunately, communication barriers have made it unclear as to what █████ we can ██████. We have received contradictory claims as to our limits, and we will not commit resources to a decision until we are absolutely sure it is the best option. As such the █████ ████████ is still pending. We thank you for your patience on this matter, but the situation will remain classified until further notice. ~ Nito & the EMINOMA Team