Spencer

Hi Guys,

We’ve been on mega crunch mode the last month working to get a ton of new features into the upcoming patch. It was an ambitious task to begin with and to throw a spanner in the mix we lost half our programming team (Tom) for the foreseeable future :'( which has definitely put the pressure on. (For those worried, Tom is fine but unfortunately has had to attend to a family emergency).

That said we have a pretty epic update on our hands with a TON of stuff that’s been in the pipelines for a long time coming together.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few weeks on creature upgrades, our AI system while efficient at doing what it currently does isn’t the easiest to add functionality to. At some point soon I hope to have time to give it a decent overhaul and replace it with a behavior tree system I’ve had my eye on for a while. In the meantime, I’ve added some new behaviour like leaping off the ground, fleeing if too close and running parallel to the player to make the interactions more complex (not just kiting in one direction).

It’s been a ton of work getting new animations, skeletons, ragdolls etc into the game but the new creature diversity on the islands is definitely worth it.

SAM Sites
I spoke briefly about mining with rockets last blog, to make things interesting in these zones that are primarily designed to be flown around we needed some PVE tools to make things more interesting. This is where our new Surface to Air missile turret comes in!

This badboy is deadly accurate, and will mess up your Mozzy if not avoided correctly giving us some really interesting denial of airspace functionality. Not only can we force Mozzys into things like valleys and force them to fly through areas at high speed, but we can deny areas of the map all together making them on foot only. We plan to extend these turrets to our construction system so that players can deploy their own turrets to shoot down enemy Mozzys, this will probably be coming next patch.

Iron Doors and Floors
Part of fixing up explosions from SAM site rockets I was able to resolve our issues blocking us from implementing the Iron door, while I was at it I added an iron floor / ceiling to go with it. We will keep an eye on raid balance and adjust accordingly.

Early Access Remains for Now
Our original plan was to leave Early Access with this patch, given the amount of new features we’ve added, and limits to our team this month we aren’t going to get the game to a level of polish that we wanted. We will spend more dedicated time on bug fixes, performance optimisation and quality of life features in the coming months before removing the Early Access tag. This is merely a marketing choice and doesn’t really affect the patch we are releasing.

Release will be going out at 10pm Melbourne time on Tuesday the 18th.

Mils

We’ve been really busy getting ready for this Islands Update which is looking pretty huge.

I’ve been quietly smashing out art assets and there have been quite a few varied things I’ve been working on so get ready for a deluge.

Firstly the Easter Island style head statue. This was a quick model I made to decorate the islands.

We added SAM launchers to the islands to create interesting Mozzy game play elements. This was really fun to work on.

These I made form the existing creature meshes and textures. These will be the items that sit in your inventory or drop on the ground when you throw them out of your backpack.

This is a new resource called Galvanite. It is a large node which can be mined by firing the Mozzy’s rockets at it. We wanted this to have a lot of contrast between the materials so it can be seen from a fair way away.

Below: The Galvanite node you mine with a Pickaxe

This is the small shard that breaks off the Galvanite resource nodes.

Lastly I made some set pieces for the new islands to dress them up and add to game play.

 

HENRY

The beast that is the in depth trailer keeps growing. it is currently a maze of clips and audio. This week we have added several new sections, which required me to pick up the mic again and add to the voice over which is very difficult to match tone and pace. The new sections feature some community footage as well as the new sam sites and islands.

With new creatures comes new sounds. I have spent a few days pooling audio from a library which will be mashed together in a frenzy of pitch shifting and reverb to make something truly awful.

Can’t wait to share this with you all next week.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, deep in environment world at the moment. We’ve run through a bunch of iterations on the islands and they are taking shape now. The hardest part was trying to a make sure players couldn’t exploit any mechanics we built into the islands, it took a whole lot of test playing and redesigning to get some enjoyable islands down. One of the funnest things has been the Mozzy islands. They are essentially small race tracks, based off of drift tracks in Japan made for lower powered cars so there’s a lot of tight linking corners and minimal straight sections. We wanted to actually challenge Mozzy pilots, so we’ve added resources you have to try shoot to mine fast enough that you avoid being shot by the Sam Sites. This will take practice, but is an extremely rewarding challenge. I’ve been working on making sure the islands really feel different and interesting. It took me a while to break the habit of using the basic formula we have on the main land. Still a lot to do, have to fix what ever is broken on the main land and repaint/add a bunch of stuff. Here’s some islands.

Spencer

Hello World!

We’re back with another instalment of Bankroll does stuff. Its been a chaotic couple weeks in the studio, we’re still hard at work on the next patch but we’ve been forced to restructure our plans slightly. Unfortunately it looks like Tom won’t be available to work on Hurtworld for the next couple of months at least, leaving us an important man down for the upcoming releases.

To save me a bunch of work so we can still work towards what we’ve been planning for our release to exit early access we’ve decided to roll this Thursdays patch into the next content update. This means there Won’t be a patch this Thursday.

The reasoning for this change is that retrofitting the 5 new creatures into the existing progression, designing the difficulty progress and suitable loot rewards would require reshuffling all our existing progression only to be changed again with the upcoming island hopper update. Instead we’ve opted to leave much of the existing progression as is, and extend the progression into the new islands with completely new endgame content.

Early Access Exit
The good news is we’ve brought forward the next release to be the 18th of June, which if all goes to plan will be our release from Early Access!!

This by no means that we’re done developing Hurtworld, I’m more excited about upcoming features than I’ve been for a long time and we still have some big plans. For the most part, Early Access is just a marketing tag that I think we’ve outgrown. After 3 and a half years of development post Early Access release (5 years total) plus a few quality of life upgrades coming this patch, we think the game is fairly representative of the quality that will continue throughout the rest of development, and we’ve hit every major goal we set out when we entered Early Access.

Island Hopper / Creature Update – 18th June
This is going to be a big one. Content that has been in the works since 2016 all finally rolling in together with systems we’ve been planning since day one. The biggest change is the introduction of islands a long way off shore of the main island of Nullius. These islands will contain new creatures, loot, challenges and mechanics not yet seen before.

PVE Challenge Islands
Some of the islands will exist as PVE challenges that favour creatures and force you to face them head on without construction, vehicles or long range kiting. We’re still working out the restrictions, but likely will contain nobuilds and no fly zones on the island requiring you to take on a large group of enemies head on. This will include creatures in higher numbers than you’re used to, as well as all our new creatures with new attack mechanics. Getting through these challenges will have big rewards.

Clan Islands
What good would adding islands be if baller clans couldn’t take over their own entire island! Utilizing a revamped territory control system, islands will be claimable and show on the map who controls it along with exclusive loot rewards for holding the specific island.

Mainland Scale Down
Nullius has always felt a little large, if we add more islands the map is going to be massive and we don’t want things to feel to sparse. To make up for these things we have scaled down the main island by 25%. Its actually hard to tell anything has changed, it just feels more cosy and running places takes less time. Overall I’m really happy with how it feels, should have done that ages ago.

Mozzy with Rockets?!
This one im particularly excited about. Dropping this patch is our first (hopefully of many) in vehicle weapon system: Rocket pods on the Mozzy.

EDIT: Replaced giphycat with youtube as it is still choppy

Mining with Rockets?!
Haven’t quite figured out how collection will work, but flying around specially built islands in a mozzy sniping resource nodes is stupid fun and has a high skill ceiling, definitely gonna work chopper mining into this patch. We will likely use different rocket types for PVP, mining and base raiding so we can balance the costs. Mining rockets can be dirt cheap allowing you to get tons of practice hitting small targets before trying to chase down a roach in a convoy. I was going to create a physics simulated machine that gathers everything around it that can be tethered to the Mozzy, which dangling it over loot would collect it for you, I think it might be a bit too clunky and get in the way of the fun part which is shooting the fuck out of everything with rockets!

Raiding with Rockets?!
Base destruction is trivial to add to rockets, so we will also include a base raiding rocket variant that can blow through walls instead of using C4.

TLDR
No patch this Thursday, we’re throwing everything into the big one on the 18th of June. Lets do this :0

Mils

So I’ve been busy making Rocket Pods for the Mozzy. These should cause some pretty funny scenarios I think. These were pretty straight forward to design and are loosely based on real rocket pods. We added the wings to the sides so you can easily see if a Mozzy flying above you has them mounted and GTFO before you get blown to pieces. Not sure how these will interact with players/vehicles/bases yet, as that will be decided by Spencer. We may do a variants guided and non-guided, but as I said nothing set in stone. We’ll have to play test it and see what feels good.

TEHSPLATT

Since the last blog I’ve finished off all the animations needed to get the creatures in game. Once we see the animations in their different game play situations we can tweak them from there. Animating the Bandril (MonkeyBat) was an interesting challenge as I have never animated a quadruped before, took a lot of research and terrible run cycles but I eventually ended up with something acceptable. The Skoogler leaping kick was definitely the most difficult, the timing for a bird jumping while also flapping it’s wings enough to keep it air born longer than it’s typical jump arc was something I was not prepared for. I have also been working on implementing islands around the out skirts of the map, these islands will host different game play challenges that mid/end game players can experience by flying out to them with the Mozzy. I’m currently designing how the islands will look and play, I want them to feel different to the main map and their being clear differences between the islands extending from different biomes. Mills is working on some unique assets to spice the islands up a bit while I use place holder assets to work out the game play. Here are some images of the new creatures hanging out on these islands.

Spencer

Hi yall,

Recently I’ve been working on water mechanics and quality of life fixes. This update I will go into a bit of detail about the next content patch scheduled for Thursday the 30th of May.

Creature Update
Over the new few weeks we will be bringing to life as many of the creatures as possible that have been long in limbo waiting for some upgrades to the AI systems. I have held off putting them into the game thus far as making reskinned boars is pretty boring…

The first member of the team I’ve been working on is a long time favourite of mine, the Skoogler. Heavily inspired by the cassowary and the turkey is a large flightless bird that proper mess your shit up. He will likely come in in later parts of the progression and will be the first creature that constant running away won’t save you.

In addition to being able to run down anything, I’m currently working on a new system to enhance the skoogler AI so they hunt and migrate in packs. They will communicate with each other and try to circle their prey while hunting. Packs will also regenerate members if not completely decimated which may provide benefits for farming, or problems if struggling to fight them off.

Here is a sneak peek of the Skoogler in game:

Other animals on the way are the MonkeyBat, the Big Cat, the Rafaga (Bird) as well as bringing back the Antor (giant mosquito) and the Dart Bug (scorpion type thing).

Theres a ton of work to do getting AI varied on all these creatures as well as filling in missing animations etc, I will aim to get everything in game atleast then possibly iterate over AI further in coming patches.

Mils

Whatup?! So I’ve been working on the MAC10 for a bit and now it’s happily ensconced in the game. I won’t bore you with any details about that because you can play with it now all by yourself. I have been working on some other stuff though.

Firstly something we have wanted back in the game since before the earth cooled is the Glider. We had one of these very early in development and it was a lot of fun to race each other in one of our very early test maps. So I’ve create a basic Glider mesh for Spencer to use as an early prototype. This is similar to a real glider. Whether we change the look of this down the line drastically, we haven’t decided that yet. This is on hold for now but I just wanted to make a mesh Spencer can use to prototype with.

Also we have decided to go ahead with rockets for the Mozzy. These are looking mean in their first stages and should be a lot of fun in game when done.

Tom

Hey Hurtworldians,

Since the last devblog our plans for an upgrade to Unity 2018 started running into some serious issues. We rolled out an early build to a small test group and quickly discovered several shader compatibility issues as well as a nasty memory leak.
I tried to fix these issues and whilst I made some decent progress into the shader issues, the memory leak refused to show up in any meaningful way in Unity’s profiling and debugging tools.
With tough issues still to fix that were essentially destroying the very reason we were upgrading (performance and stability improvements) we made the tough decision to indefinitely delay the Unity upgrade.
Because we had been working in the 2018 version we had to transfer our work back into the 5.6 version, this was easy enough for the codebase but significant changes in serialization patterns made backporting assets a trickier process that couldn’t really be automated. This is why 0.7.2.0 ended up getting split into 0.7.2.0 and 0.7.3.0 a week later with all the assets.
Going forward we will continue to investigate solutions to our upgrade issues but if we cannot fix the problems on low spec machines we will not be moving ahead with an upgrade.

I’ve also been working on bugfixes to go into the 0.7.3.1 hotfix patch that we just released. The most significant fix there was probably the ‘Roach peeking’ fix.
Because the Roach’s rear seat FPS camera position was outside of the vehicle collider it was possible to position the Roach so the rear seat could see through walls.
To fix this up I changed the Roach’s rear seat into an unsafe entry type of seat that performs an overlap and line of sight check on an entry attempt and blocks the passenger if either of these fail (this makes it work like the Kanga and Goat driver seats).
The other major change was adding an attached body component to the rear seat. Now when a passenger enters the rear seat the vehicle connects another simple capsule physics body to the vehicle via a joint and this simulates the vehicle/passenger connection. If this joint receives too much force it will break (for example, someone trying to push your head through the wall by using a spear on the vehicle) and on breaking it puts the passenger into the crash state.
Kangas and Goats also have this attached body component running on their driver seats.

I’ve also been working on making the tether system more stable, removing the tether break limits and allowing multiple players to have active tethers in the same tether network (think like a tug of war scenario). This change was planned to go into 0.7.3.1 but we found some last minute pooling issues that caused us to delay it until the next hotfix, we are now looking at releasing this fix sometime before the next wipe on the 16th of May.

TEHSPLATT

Hey, this week I’ve been working on creature animations. We are currently trying to get all the old creatures up to scratch, this means figuring out what animations are missing and filling them in while also deciding how exactly their game play is going to work. My specialisation is not in animation so there is a bit of a learning curve but nothing I can’t handle. The hardest challenge going forward will be the Monkeybat as it’s a combination of a two creatures that walk in interesting ways so I will need to do a bit of research and also step up my walk cycle game as this creature is missing pretty much all its animations. Here’s some of the test animations I have been working on. Trying to match the quality of the original creature animations is going to be a pretty hard thing to do but my main focus is just making sure the animations don’t stand out as stiff low quality place holders, more like, medium quality place holders haha.