Spencer

Hi Fam,

Work is progressing well on the things I spoke about in the last dev blog. So far I’ve mainly been working on long standing annoying bugs that I’ve put off for ever as they didn’t seem that important, I’m still not entirely convinced that this is time well spent but also can’t picture exiting early access with a bunch of broken stuff still in the game regardless of whether it actually affects anyone’s enjoyment.

Progress on the rocket launcher is going well, delving into animation for the first time since Dazzler was part of the team has been a mission, I kinda wish we did it earlier as we’re regaining a lot of skills that would have been handy while choosing which content to develop over the last couple of years.

Rock Exploits
I’m happy to say with some new detection techniques and some heavy bans we have completely eradicated people using rock exploits from the game. Its an ongoing fight but people seem to have finally gotten the message that exploits aren’t going to fly anymore.

When Update
The next update will be the launch from early access, early access exit, V2 Version 1.0 whatever you want to call it. We kinda put ourselves in a corner naming and update in Early Access V2. Hurtworld V2 1.0 sounds dumb enough to work lets go with that. This patch won’t be going out until the end of November, firstly because we need the time to iron out remaining bugs and finish up some content, but also because there is a ton more people playing games around end of year holidays and its a good time for a launch. I personally welcome the breathing space.

Server consolidation
With the quiet of that breathing space comes a decent drop in player numbers as we would expect. Doesn’t make sense to have tons of half empty servers, so we will be consolidating things next wipe. Servers will be less granular region based and more varied on things like wipe times. Wipe wise I will probably create a longer wipe time server as it will be lasting a couple months before a forced wipe.

Mils

I’ve been working on this beast the last few weeks. We will soon have a Rocket Launcher! I’ve been hard at work designing this bad boy which is loosely based off 2 existing rocket launcher designs. We wanted to create something that looks like it’s been manufactured but with our own design twist. It’s been a pleasure to work on and cam up nicely. Spence is in the process of finalising the function and Splatt has been slaving away on the animations so it looks right when used by the player in the game.

I also did some minor project polish on some items in the game like Icon poses and world item scalings. Some of the world items were ridiculously large, so I sanitised them a bit.

TEHSPLATT

I have spent the last month diving deep into our players rig so that we can get a new weapon in the game. The rocket launcher. Our players rig was created before my time and has lay dormant for as long as I can remember. After doing the missing animations for the creatures I decided I could tackle the player rig. It was extremely difficult and there were times I felt like maybe I had made a mistake accepting this task but after hours of slowly chipping away at each little problem we actually have new animations for a new weapon. They may not be the greatest animations as I am not an animator and even if I were, I wasn’t exactly working with the friendliest of rigs but hey, they work. So now I’m just compiling a list of which ones look the worst and going to start polishing them up.

I’m also fixing a few thing with the map, certain towns not having events, floating rocks, things like that. Trying to get any manual fix up work taken care of with the stamping process, which I’ve done before but obviously as we add new stuff new manual work pops up.

Spencer

Hi All, The last few weeks we’ve switched gears a little bit as we focus on solving some quality of life issues and bugs that have been around for a while. I’ve also personally been spending a lot of time working on cleaning up the community and liberally brandishing the ban hammer for those who would seek to ruin our community. In the early days of Hurtworld my philosophy was let anyone do or say what they want, let the community run itself. In hindsight I don’t think this was the best choice, it only takes a few bad eggs to ruin things for a large amount of people as well as soak up a disproportionate amount of my time and energy. Since adopting a zero bs tolerance I feel much happier interacting with the community. Sorry it took us almost 4 years to figure out!

Next patch plans
We are now working towards exiting early access. This isn’t going to be a normal monthlyish content drop and will take a little longer. First things first we are working on ironing out any long standing bugs that don’t belong in a completed game. Secondly we are working to smooth out the new player experience and remove any roadblocks that cause slightly less patient people to bounce off the game.

Achievement / Tutorial
This will come in the form of something similar to minecraft at this point. Mapping out the tech tree and giving some guidance on what new players should be working towards next, each step giving the player an achievement. This sort of thing really isn’t my Jam, but I understand in the current age of spoon feeding, lots of players feel lost without it. Everyone will have the option to disable this at any time.

First Base Setup
One of the most difficult things to get done when starting Hurtworld is getting your first 1×1 base online. This can be a challenge even when you understand the construction system not being killed while getting your stake up, doing this while also trying to figure out how the menu works wouldn’t be much fun. The basic plan is to have a shack like deployable that throws down a 1×1 using the build system with stake in a single click that can’t be placed over build cell boundaries. Price would be the same, would just smooth out the risk curve a bit. Along with this I want to try disabling construction outside owned build cells for normal construction pieces, then creating some new scaffolding pieces that can be placed in unowned cells for building onto rocks / raiding. This should eliminate noobs setting up their base wrong, getting their base wiped and complaining to me that someone teleported into their base without C4. Another option for neutral cells would be requiring people to throw down a cheap temp ownership stake that basically says “Yes I realize this isn’t my normal build cell, I still want to build here”.

Rocket Launcher
The main new feature rolling out with this patch will be the rocket launcher, a non homing RPG type launcher with (probably) various types of rockets that can be used to bring down mozzies, raid bases and blow up other players. This is the first new weapon animation set we’ve created since Dazzler left a couple years ago. Opening us up to more new animation based equip in future.

Optimization
There is still a bit of work to do on optimization, one of those things is investigating if re-enabling forcing dx11 feature set 9.3 is possible without adding exploits, the aim is to get back to legacy performance by our early access release.

Inside rock detection
Recent addition of detecting players inside rocks have been proving fruitful dealing out 20+ perma bans in the last week. If ya don’t know, now ya know. Cheat or exploit = ded.

Release date
We don’t have a concrete date for this patch, we will be aiming for the 26th of September

TEHSPLATT

Hello. Finished another town this week, wanted to go back to basics and have a semi-simple layout. I always try to make each town feel different in terms of how you move around it, that might mean a lot of jump puzzles or you spend all your time trying to climb and get up high or the map has a bunch of different routes that allow you to use your knowledge of the map to out manoeuvre opponents. Sometimes, you just wanna go back to basics haha, so even though this has it’s fair share of accessible rooftops, the way it plays is much more like a typical FPS map. Which essentially means, be smart with your positioning, make sure you know your escape routes in case things get too intense and most of all…  git gud. You can see here, the process from rough sketch to clean layout sketch to final town. Usually there’s a grey box step but I used parts from the previous town so the grey box and final didn’t look too different. There was a whole lot of other sketches of different ideas and layouts that lead to the final version but they are far too messy for anyone to understand. The goal now is to make sure there’s no duplicate towns in any individual biome.  Also, there’s a handy loading bay at the back of the town for you to park your slug when unloading heavy slot items for the Crafters.

Mils

So I just got back from an epic holiday for the best part of a month. Back refreshed and relaxed and jet-lagged as hell 🙂

Can anyone say Rocket Launcher?! So I’m jumping into a Rocket Launcher design that is based on a few different existing Launchers. I get to be a bit creative with this one which will be a fun project. I’ll be trying to keep the design in line with other real weapon designs so that it looks completely functional and therefore feels like it might actually exist.

This is harder to pull off than it might sound but I really enjoy trying to create something where every part is as lightweight and logically engineered as possible.

Below: An early grey boxed low poly mesh. This will possibly get changed but looks decent so far.

Spencer

Hi All,

Its been a big few weeks since the 0.8 path go live. Welcome to all the new players from the Steam Summer Sale!

This week we’ve been a bit all over the place hunting down new exploits and spending a bit of time cleaning up the community with the new influx of players. Part of this process was welcoming our first volunteer moderator “klauz” which I’m sure needs no introduction. This is our first step in being more active on our communication channels and weeding out the bad eggs that ruin the experience for others.

The second step to this process much less tolerance to exploits and those who knowingly play with and benefit from cheaters in their clans. If you think one of you clan mates is cheating or exploiting, distance yourself from them or risk getting a perma ban.

Performance Progress
I didn’t get as much done on the performance pass that I had hoped by now. Hopefully next week should free up some more time to crack down on the low hanging optimisation fruit.

Next Patch
We will be aiming to get the next content patch out on Thursday the 1st of August, the main feature here will be the new boat, performance optimisation and hopefully some quality of life changes for new players as we lead up to the exit from early access.

TEHSPLATT

Hello, after last weeks patch I’ve started working on a new town event to replace the duplicates. The plan is to replace all the duplicate events, this is going to be a bit of big job but will definitely be worth it. I’m looking at ways to speed up the process, for example building creating prefabs from pre-existing assets that can be re-used within a specific biome to a create an on going theme. Not for all of them, but just a few, so if you had something like a bandit village aesthetic for a specific biome, then you could use that same aesthetic on a few towns within that biome. They would all have different layouts and play completely differently but they would have similar assets to speed up the process. The new town I’m designing has a very close quarters feel, as it will be in the start desert I want it to focus much more on spears than bows. So lot’s of running through interiors and jumping from roof to roof. It can be difficult making the towns actually feel different to fight in, but there’s still lots of unexplored designs to get through.

This is the draft layout of the latest town. There’s a lot of planning that goes into the routes a player can take and the options to take make different strategic decisions. I don’t like forcing the player down only one route with no options. I always try to balance risk vs reward, if one route has a lot of cover then it might consist of some lethal jumps if another route is pretty close to the capture point then it might leave you out in the open the whole time making it risky, but rewarding if you survive.

This is an image of the final version of this town event. Essentially the same thing but much more polished and a few things layed out slightly better.

Mils

Hey amigo’s! I’ve been working on the speedboat for the last couple of weeks. Introducing ‘The Barra’ (Barramundi) This vehicle is a simple transport craft that will allow players who don’t have a Mozzy (chopper) to get to the islands. This was an issue many players brought up on the forums and it made sense that there should be an alternate way to the islands. This isn’t going to be a personal vehicle that you lovingly store in a boat shed or anything like that. It will be a fairly disposable method of transport, hence it doesn’t have interchangeable panels or skins etc because the will most likely just be sitting on the beach. At least that’s the plan so far. This came out really nice and has a really speedy shape. I have never worked on a boat, so this was an interesting learning experience as with all things new that I have to become at least visually competent with.

P.S I’m off on a holiday for 3-4 weeks see you all back here after that.