Birds Are Stockpiling Gold

The last few weeks has seen a lot of the team take time for vacation or going to GDC, so progress has been a bit slower than usual. Progress hasn’t stopped though, and notably we’ve started work on the store, which is one of the bigger features remaining. The birds seem to have quickly taken notice of this and immediately started stockpiling gold. We’ll have to tweak the economy a bit so those hoarders contribute to the alliance appropriately!

Store

The game now has support for multiple different currencies that can be dropped anywhere we can drop/give items – from enemies, quests or the sky (ok, probably not the sky). The UI is still a work in progress, but we already have a very basic store where you can spend these currencies for various items. Items in the store are can be static or replenished according to a schedule. We’ve started adding functionality so you can buy some of the currencies with real money from external payment gateways and done a first test to confirm it works! There’s still a lot of rough edges, but the basic framework for the store is there and will continue to get better over the coming weeks!

Art

As usual, the game continues to keep getting more beautiful week after week. We’re not quite sure where all this extra beauty is being mined from, but now that we have currencies we will be sure to investigate that mining and appropriately tax it!

  • Boss animations for:
    • Doomsday
    • Escort
    • Gecklestone
    • Eyeball boss
  • New Raptor and Engineer models and variants
  • New Engineer turrets
  • New soulbound effect for soulbound items.
  • Modeled/colored/integrated a new factory dungeon set
  • Updated/iterated Medic variants
  • Variant designs for hog and duster
  • Modeling and rigging a rough paladin for a test
  • Portrait iteration
  • Finish goose quest unit implementation
  • Instructor modeling
  • Hog modelling

Quests

Quests continue to get improved, which is a very long-running quest in and of itself.

  • Add quest notifications to chat log in case the player misses them
  • For rewards, auto-equip and handle items more like being picked up
  • Rework replay conditions to fit needs better
  • Add ‘invisible’ quests for tracking things in the background
  • New quest: Ghost: Fight a disappearing/reappearing ghost.
  • New quest: “Tower of Ra” web: Big web of 30 laser towers.

Other

  • Server scaling is now live on the production servers
  • Auto disable motion blur and SSAO when low FPS is detected
  • Add `/switchradius` command: mass teleport people to a server (for admins)
  • Show notifications when auto consuming an item on pickup.
  • Bugfix: Unit age: Every unit spawning had an age of 0. Used for dropships.
  • Bugfix: potential blackscreen after /die
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