Hey crew, another month of development has quickly passed. I hope you all enjoyed the recent holidays and have had a good start to the new year! Our community is growing so quickly and everyone here at Trash Planet Games is so grateful for your excitement about IRONCLAD, but I'll stop stalling and get to the information you've been waiting for.
Playtest?
We are planning on hosting public playtests starting late February. There's still a lot of "t"s we want to cross and "i"s we want to dot, but we're really excited to get IRONCLAD into the hands of everyone. The size of these playtests may start out smaller and grow in size as we get more clarity on what's working and what's not, but those specifics will have to be ironed out later. If you want an announcement right when playtests go live, then make sure to join the Trash Planet Games Discord!
Progress
Development has been moving along smoothly and the holidays didn't slow us down much. We made a lot of great improvements, but we still have our plates full with what's to come. It's truly very enjoyable to work on IRONCLAD and interact with the community on a daily bases. Here are the scrappy patch notes:
Tanks
Vastly improved the physics setup for our Beef Tank so it drives much more reliably, specifically up and down inclines
Vastly improved movement replication for clients
Fixed players from preventing the tank from moving by standing against the interior walls of the tank
Increased the culling range of the tank so they don't go out of range and stop replicating
Improved turret rotation smoothing for everyone (but mostly clients)
Fixed tank loading bugs including collision issues, gun firing rate, and the inability for clients to load the guns.
Adjusted various movement parameters including turret and tank rotation speeds
Fixed some tank collision issues
Added Fuel to the tank that is consumed while driving. Vehicles cannot drive without fuel.
Items
Implemented the Fuel Can which can be used to fill the vehicles full of fuel
Fuel Can can be shot and blown up, dealing damage (to players or enemies) in a radius proportional to the amount of fuel left in the Can
Player
Made improvements to the Camera so it doesn't clip into the walls of buildings nearly as often
Implemented player nametags and microphone indicators above the players' heads
Monsters
Fixed a bug where dead monsters wouldn't release players they had grabbed before dying (this resulted in the only course of action being a violent execution of the grabbed player).
Environment/Structures
Made improvements to the model and textures for the Gate building
Implemented the gate building
Implemented working doors in the Gate and Hanger buildings (includes SFX)
Added a sign in the buildings the relevant buildings that display the Join Code (previously only visible in the Settings menu)
Textured and implemented BEACONS, the pathfinding structure for locating Artifacts. (This implementation include SFX and VFX)
Simplified colliders for various buildings and added more lighting
UI
Adjusted some UI sound FX
Resized Tank Ammo Icons in HUD
Replaced pistol ammo icon
General
Fixed various crash bugs
Probably other stuff, idk.
Since I did a little intro, I'm not going to do much of an outro. See y'all in a month (or much more often if you're in the discord).