Happy Holidays everyone! Hope everyone has an opportunity to spend this season with friends/loved ones.
Nothing much to report on this one, but wanted to push some content that I’d hoped would have been included in the last update. In the past two weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time working on new assets and the new map, Afghanistan Mountains. This will provide a new flavor to the Afghanistan maps as flat deserts turn into mountainous terrain.
After this map is completed, I’ll continue to spend more time creating short and long scenarios for the new maps (I haven’t forgotten about the Vietnam map). Content is the goal right now, so you can expect to see more and more scenarios coming out (if you have any requests, let me know in the discussion forum).
In addition, there have been a few tweaks made to the projectile variables. There have been several optimizations made to the class, allowing us to increase the quantity of shrapnel pieces that are calculated on each impact. The effectiveness of each round is a balancing act between the amount of shrapnel pieces (ultimately, the likelihood of scoring a hit on a target) and the amount of damage that shrapnel causes.
To keep performance high, the quantity of shrapnel was kept low while the damage was relatively high. Essentially, an impact was less likely to hit the target, but when it did it usually damaged enough to kill the infantry. This ultimately has led to frustration for people as seemingly close hits were leaving the AI untouched. I’ve tried to address this by doing two things:
- Improving the numbers across the board for shrapnel count, shrapnel range, and damage causes. Previously I tried to approach this from a more structured, scientific (if you will) method but thought it would be better to (although keeping some structure) base it more on “feel.” It is a tricky balance as I don’t want guns to be overpowered (*cough Call of Duty *cough), but I also don’t want consistent, unnecessary frustration for players.
- Adding a “hit” animation for the AI, to give some physical representation of them being wounded. I intend to take this much further in the next update or two, by adding different states (wounded, unconscious, etc.) with additional animations. This should give additional depth to the experience, rather than it being binary – dead or alive. I think having the opportunity to “knockout” personnel who later recover and move again is an important aspect of the experience (despite the natural obscenity of it).
I have also been considering giving the user direct control over the munition variables if they choose to alter them. This would allow users to dictate their own experience and “feel” for the guns, regardless of what I think may be more realistic and accurate.
That pretty much wraps everything up on this one. Be sure to check out the roadmap in game to see a more itemized list of what I’ll be working on for the next updates. If you have any suggestions on new content, changes to already implemented systems, or bugs to report; please shoot them my way in our community discord or in a steam discussion forum. I actively monitor these and try to answer/respond to these as quickly as possible. No doubt the feedback I’ve received from players is what is driving this game towards improvement, and I greatly appreciate the efforts.
Until next time! Have a good holiday season and New Year!
Changelog
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue that was causing the physical character meshes to stretch on dismemberment.
- Fixed a bug that was preventing AI cover points from being created. This would cause AI to sometimes not move after being fired at.
- Fixed some terrain issues causing AI to get stuck in the map Afghanistan Rural Village.
Visual Effect Updates
- Tweaked the smoke in the impact effects to last longer.
Gunship Updates
- Tweaked the projectile/munition variables to increase lethality.
AI Updates
- Added a new “hit” animation to the infantry.
UI/Menu Updates
- Added an audio slider for music (only applies to the main menu sound right now).
Map/Scenario Updates
- Added a new scenario for Afghanistan Rural Village: Training Range.
- Added a new scenario for Afghanistan Rural Village: Taliban Shoot.
- Added a new Zombie Rush scenario for Afghanistan Rural Village: Close Quarter Compound.