Spencer

Hey Hurtworldians!

In just under 2 weeks time, December 10th, Hurtworld will be launching out of Early Access. This will include a patch introducing the new hand held rocket launcher, a new body kit for the Roach, and most importantly tons of bug fixes and polish.

We decided not to go too heavy on the content for this patch and focused on long standing bug fixes to ensure we don’t compromise on the stability of the game as we exit early access.

What does exiting Early Access mean?
For us Early Access isn’t much more than a marketing tag, one that says there might be some rough edges and missing features right now, maybe check back later if you’re not into that sort of thing. At this point we feel we have achieved everything we initially set as a list of goals when we started early access 4 years ago. While we don’t see the game as ever “complete”, we think the current level of quality and set of features is indicative of what we want to maintain going forward.

Rest assured we will continue to working on Hurtworld for as long as there are people playing it to ensure the game remains a stable multiplayer experience for years to come.

Thanks to everyone who has come along the ride with us, lets get hype for a big launch!

Mils

So for the first time in a long time I have been working on a new bodykit for the Roach…

Behold the Asylum!

This bad boy has a semi APC, semi Lamborghini inspired design. Strange combo, but I really like how chunky it is. Looks very military and utilitarian. I’m not sure how it’s going to fit into gameplay and what it’s rarity will be but it will go into the next release.

This should keep the driver and passengers very well protected from gunfire, except at the front. If you want to play chicken and try shoot the driver out before they run you over, go for it!

I can’t wait to drive this bad boy.

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.