Short story time!
We’ve had an uncommon bug for kind of a while. Bosses would just stop doing stuff for a while. They’d stop shooting and just take punishment for a short while. No clear way to repro, for months! I developed some cool tools to try and track it down. It just seemed to keep happening randomly. I see it happening in the videos that folks have been posting. It’s kinda hard to know it’s happening unless you know the boss’s full patterns and what it should be doing at any moment. So that’s how things were until today. Frustrating.
A tangent about prototyping. A super long time ago, we experimented with all sorts of different bullet effects beyond fire and ice. We had confusion, weakness, sickness, silence, blind, and jam (some of thse may make a triumphant return later, we’ll have to see). Most of the effects just weren’t that great and died on the vine. And a long time ago, when the sniper weapon was just a dream because we didn’t have piercing bullets, danc made a prototype sniper gun. Then when I added piercing, a longish time ago, I just added that to the guns. And until today, we hadn’t really thought about that part of the config too much. So we juuuuust realized that all snipers have a 5 second jam effect on them (and we were not the first). Any unit the sniper hit would stop shooting all its guns for 5 whole seconds. The jam effect, forgotten for all this time, still works perfectly.
Definitely one of those SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY moments! So now that we’ve removed the jam effect from the sniper, we expect that enemies in general should be substantially harder. Since they will be shooting at you more.
In other changes, I fixed a bug or two relating to switching planes at the hangar. I wasn’t able to reproduce all of the issues that were reported, so please make some noise if you see anything awry there! Thank you again for all the info you’ve given me; sometimes even though I can’t see the issue myself, all the circumstantial evidence can lead me to find the killer. (see, comparing myself to a scientist and a detective, video games are very dramatic to develop)
Other, less comparable-to-other-professions changes in today’s update:
- Did first pass of optimization on item pickup animations and the pop-out panel, an area of performance concern.
- Summoner bosses have lower health, should be less of a slog.
- Bugfix to keep player names from going invisible. It was showing their level but not their name. We’re more than just a number, game!
We’re still managing to crank out these daily updates! Please keep reporting bugs and giving us feedback! Put your “#1 Steambird” mugs high on your desks.