Dev Log 7 - Demo Update, New Stuff, Patreon Changes, Crunch Time

Hi everyone. We’ve been aiming for a demo release of our new game by the end of August but we’ve decided to push it to the end of September, sorry! We want to deliver a full vertical slice of the game and there’s still some things to work out. One of those things is inventory management. 

Since you and your party will be progressing forward through a dungeon, it's important to be able to stash items for later, in a way that lets everyone stay mobile. We didn't like the idea of just making everyone's inventory bigger so we came up with a new solution: a backpack. It's crazy that no ones ever thought of this idea before and we’re the first ones to do it. Just kidding, but the backpack is gonna be pretty cool and novel in some ways.

The backpack is a physical object that can be worn, dropped, thrown, opened and lost. All players will only ever have 1 bag between them, and if it's lost, a new bag will spawn at the start of the next “level”.

(work in progress)

The bag carrier can sling the backpack over their shoulder and hold it out in front of them to allow other players to throw items into it. It’s kind of ridiculous to make a diegetic backpack system but we think it’ll be a fun way to manage inventory, requiring a light social exchange between players. Making it a physical object that can be lost, stolen, run over by monsters also has some pretty cool implications I think. Here's a snippet from the initial design blockout for the backpack I thought was funny, although we've changed some aspects of it since then.

Some other things we’ve done in the past few weeks 

-New item: Glow in the dark Orbeez gun

- Enemy wave system : groups of enemies will sometimes spawn and hunt players down, breaking doorways in their path. Wave difficulty can be increased over time as well.

-Thrown daggers will now stick into players and objects

-Enhanced visuals for VFX such as smoke, blood, goop, bullet impacts and tracers

-Enhanced First Person animations and spring system for FPS hands

-Better Rat AI, animations and cues.

-Started work on a new biome area.

-General hit detection / collision improvements

-Paid back alot of tech debt, optimization, netcode improvements.

-Alot of other things I cant remember right now.

Main things we still need to complete for the demo

-Implement our concept for a recurring puzzle that will help tie together some elements of our game

-Illness/ disease system

-Hook up proc-gen levels

-Add in some armor so that players arent just running around naked

-Various UI's, quality of life improvements, optimization passes and item economy/ difficulty curve tweaks.

So quite a bit, but we're gonna crunch and get this thing out there!! (we love work and no one pays us except you guys so we're allowed to crunch ok??)

Also one more thing. I guess Patreon's now taking a 30% cut from those of you who subscribe through the IOS app.

Obviously we’re not going to raise our prices, but if you don't want to give 30% of your donation to the Patreon/ Apple industrial complex we suggest you cancel your sub and renew it on your desktop. But either way we’re very grateful for your support. Thanks!