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!

rocketpods

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.

MozzyHornets

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.

Islands1 Islands2 Islands3 Islands4