NOTES: Apologies for the overexposure and artifacts on the clip; I was recording an HDR color space onto a non-HDR-compliant video format and will adjust for future recordings. Also, we wanted a longer clip this time, so the slight reduction in framerate and touch of 2x speed at the end is to enable that per our upload file size limitation on this blog (this thing plays ~1000 frames/sec without the limiter in place and wants to melt all our video cards). There is no audio recorded for this clip.
Also, anything you see in the alpha/pre-alpha gameplay may or may not represent its form in v1 of the game release. This includes camera settings, player movement, animations, sound effects, UI, etc.
Alright, more team gibbing happened today! In this clip, there are some meaningful additions to the current alpha build we’re super stoked on: weapon pickups are a thing now, there are two new weapons (machine gun and sawn off shotgun), some adjustments to network stability have been made as well as several invisible changes. As a result, we had a long period of game stability today to test and chat about everything we’ll be tackling over the coming weeks.
We’re aiming to have weapon pickups work very similarly to pickups in Mario Kart in how they seem to be a mystery on acquisition and a random pick from all options available. We’re also planning on incorporating pickup weapons and throwables/items in a similar way to how that inventory system works in that you have a single inventory slot and will need it empty before your character can acquire a new pickup option of that type.
Regarding details of visual aspects, we are approaching that work zone with only light work being done for now (more so implementing meaningful systems – things like stamina, health, pickups, locomotion/movement and then tweaking said things until they are at least okay as a system to return to later. The visualization of said systems is always a separate process). However, we’re considering a pull back of the camera, we’ll need to start work toward finding what we think of as the perfect distance/angle for high levels of PvP engagement while taking full advantage of the spaces the map provides for tactical variance, and we’re going to be playing around with character speed and tracking thereof for more smooth movement as currently, the server sync state is producing some funny (only kind of) “limp” behavior. Adding more animations and IK will make things look much more natural as far as player movement. Also – bullets won’t have that range you see, we’ll be adding a physic material to the terrain to add a touch of friction or dampening collider movement (multiple ways to address player drift), as well as myriad other things we have notes and Trello cards for. This doesn’t even go into the stamina system which we’ll cover in later posts as this will enable rolling/dodging and sprinting as well to incorporate more tactical balance and meaningful decisions.
So much of this process is so granular, there are changes and updates happening to the project every single day. And we will be posting monumental or significant differences on this blog post so the change and contrast is more apparent than it might be to someone who is staring at a Unity project all day or familiar with the complete process of game development. Either way, we are happy to share the process and ecstatic to start actually playing our multiplayer mega mayhem dream game 💜