Welcome back to our irregular blog series! We’ve been working on a bunch of awesome changes since last time so this is a nice long post.
Art
The new work on plans and skins is really opening up the possibilities for players to express themselves. Long gone are the planes of old which all look like they went to the same paint shop. Every time we gather for a new play session there is some unavoidable marvelling at the new models and strutting them around a bit.
- High def Quad now has more bolts
- Tutorial environment and enemies have been given an art pass
- First quest boss (mysterious signals) given an initial art pass
- Temple dungeon has custom environment, enemies and boss art
- Medic variants and lods added
- Art update to temple dungeon environment and enemies
- Big Chuck tutorial enemy model/uvish
- Smokes for tutorial and checked the smokes in the overworld
- Raptor aaaaht: Base one is in
- Concepts: Quest ships. Goose
- Eyeball boss, boss animation
- Modeled (and streamed!) merlin base
Soulbound Items
We have some items in the game that we want to tie to players, so we’ve introduced the well-known concept of soulbound items. These items can be soulbound to a players on pickup (when you get them) or when you first use them. You can try dropping items that are soulbound, but they won’t appear for other players. You can still share them between your planes via storage! Together with this, items can be consumable with a limited number of uses.
Quests
New exciting quests are also starting to take form. Ranging from the encompassing tutorial quests (have those catipedes been a bit feisty lately?), to escort missions (get the goose loose to the destination point), to hunting down some abnormally large sharks and their swarm (flying shark swarms? eek!). The quest system is starting to move from a functional emotionless system to the backbone for some exciting interesting content that highlights some of the more nuanced parts of the game and adds some new parts that weren’t possible before!
- Tutorial quests:
- Added quest objective content that helps navigate between servers
- Added instructions for players in tutorial mission script
- Improvements to dialogue implementation
- Lots of polish
- Lots of tiny bug fixes to quests and the dialogue system
- Polish pass on quest system and UI
- Quest UI better indicates available/accepted/completed
- Quest find goal: Get close to unit
- Added quest objective content that helps navigate between servers
- Added instructions for players in tutorial mission script
- Improvements to tutorial dialogue
- New quest: Destroy the turret repair drones
- Quests bug fixes and yet more configs options
- Quest items are soulbound by default
- Quest advanced guidance system
- Added 2 new demo quests: Shark Outbreak, Enemy Turret Redux
- Polish on demo/tutorial quests
- Reorganized generic quests into difficulty bands to group players
- Did a pass on quest config “chronological” reorganization
Server Scaling
We’ve deployed our new server scaling setup now! The servers will dynamically scale up and down to adapt to the number of players. There’s probably still some bugs lurking in there to fix, but for now it’s pretty stable and we’re actively playing with it! Since there will be more Rebel City instances with more birds the game got an options to switch between the cities and set a preferred one.
Starting Plane
We’re working on the start of the game for new players, offering them a choice between two classes – one with the plane-style controls, and one with the dual-stick controls. This comes with a new tutorial dungeon and still has some more work, but we already have a menu and a meaningful choice to make!
Other
- The graphic options for the blur and the SSAO (screen space ambient occlusion) now have a sane default state when you switch between mediocre and fantastic quality.
- Auto reduce render quality on low FPS
- Bot that connects to Slack and lets us know about things going on in the game
- First try to fix the enemies wandering around
- Cloud fading shader – clouds fade with area colours
- Player and ally names moved for comfort and legibility