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.

 

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.