Hey Guys,
As we move towards EA release the updates will be more ‘status’, less ‘shiny content’. Here is what we are working on.

Cow_Trix

This week we moved offices (literally across the road) into a bigger, more permanent space. We’re all in one room now – before we were split over two, so that’s a big improvement for us. Check out the awesome Hurtworld poster, designed by Mils.

We also did a big merge – we’ve all been working on separate versions of the game for a while, implementing different features. Now, they’re all back into one version of the game.

Spencer

This week has mainly been taken up by the move and the merge. Now all the steam changes are in one place, we go through the fun of integrating / balancing everything and making sure content is production ready. I didn’t get to revamp vehicles like I wanted to, that will have to wait a few days now. This week I will primarily be focusing on integrating all the new content in the map.

Gameplay Design Shift

The more fleshed out the map gets, the more it feels far too big. I’m happy we pushed our tech to support such large areas without performance issues for later down the track, however just because we can doesn’t mean we should. We will be doing internal play tests toying with some new ideas to encourage player interaction.

The largest of the changes will be:

• A smaller playable map (meaning smaller biomes, and more diverse content per square km)
• Less penalty for death
• More contention over resources (less abundance)

I want to create a slightly more hostile environment, while balancing this out with less death penalty. Hopefully this will make gunfights less one sided, and give people less to lose when leaving the house with gear on.

More on this soon

Mils

Following on from last week’s post, I have also been very busy building the panels and attachments for the vehicles. Here you can see a basic set of components designed to give both aesthetic and functional uses.
We can’t wait to see the crazy mutant combinations players come up with. Combining these with the skins I spoke about last week, will add a lot to the game.

Gavku

Not much sizzle from me this week, as I have been mainly working on environment splats for the various biomes. The outback desert was looking a tad bland so I built a couple of custom plants for it. This one is a type of desert succulent.

Dazzler

I am putting on my editor cap to get a trailer for EA ready.

Hey Guys,

Fairly productive week all round, finally seeing some of the long backed up content getting into the game, previews below.

Spencer

This week I’ve been working on getting as much unique feel into each of the biomes as possible while keeping the level of polish that our initial desert has.

Something I quickly realized was brightly lit blown out scenes are much more forgiving than more saturated / overcast scenes. Surprisingly, every playtest in Hurtworld that has an overcast / cold  looking scene, nobody wanted to be there. As soon as we put a vibrant sunny beautiful scene back in this went away and we wanted to play for hours. The challenge here is to create harsh areas that give the player new challenges, while still making the player want to claim the space and spend time there. The feature image is my favorite so far, the Australian Desert.

Given this challenge, I’ve been working on polishing up the feel of our different biomes to a point where I want to live there, despite everything wanting to kill me.

While tweaking lighting, I decided to finally make the switch over to linear lighting. This is something that has always been on the todo list but the Unity tree / terrain system shaders had some serious issues when switching over. Sean and I fixed up all the shaders and we are now good to go. Linear lighting changes the way we do lighting calculations to be more physically correct. Long story short, this look a LOT better.

While looking at lighting, I upgraded our tonemapper and added eye adaption to the camera. This simulates the effect of your eyes or the exposure of a camera adjusting to varied levels of brightness. This allows us to push our lighting into much wider brightness ranges, without having to endlessly tweak settings to get it to look right making the biome configuration much more forgiving. As with any new toy, I am probably over using it right now and will dial it back. For now I’m in love with this effect.

Next week I’m planning to completely overhaul the server side vehicle physics. Currently they aren’t much fun to drive due to being too realistic, I hope to greatly simplify things and get a more of an arcade feel.

Cow_Trix

I’ve been blowing stuff up with dynamite this week – our first throwable item. You can mine large resource nodes with these babies, or use them to kill players and destroy machines. Note however that they don’t do damage to structures! You’re still going to need the more expensive C4 for raiding.

Mils

We decided to add skins to our vehicles, giving players a way to customize and differentiate between themselves and others. This will be useful when creating a clan or crew, so you know a friendly when you see one. Sean wrote a custom shader, which after much tweaking allowed us to set a pattern and 3 colors to paint the object. These will translate to discoverable patterns and craftable paints to make that vehicle your own.
We used the RGB channels to define each colour of the mask. It took a while to get right. The layering within the image file was confusing at first but I simplified the process down to something workable.

Gavku

Lately I have been working on trees via tree creator which is a fairly frustrating tool to use. You can get decent results, but need to be quite strict in how you go about editing the trees you create. Some functions will revert over previous edits, and some times it will just completely shit out useless maps…..I basically now have a unity scene where I’ll build a couple of trees, export them as packages, and bring them into the project. This way if anything breaks its generally easier to track down what and fix it.

Nice trees – pretty when they work

Broken trees – Normals and shader wrong

Dazzler

I have been working on driving animations and a laundry list of animation bugs/polish. Among these was doing a more convincing jump that would allow you to crouch mid air. CS:GO videos were a great reference source.

Hello Hurtworlders,

Another busy week as we race towards release. Lots to do and lots being done (not all of which can be shown in this post).

As always, post bugs and feedback to reddit!

Spencer

This week I’ve been implementing some of the backlog of art the rest of the guys have been working over the last few months. Part of which is putting some new systems in place for some cool vehicle stuff. I will do a proper writeup on that next week once it’s more in concrete.

Cow_Trix

Sean has been keeping this show on the road with lots of bug-fixing. Localization is implemented and our volunteers have be doing a great job. Russian, Croatian, Dutch and Italian are pretty much done. Spanish, Ukrainian and Portuguese should not be far off. Still really looking for French and German Volunteers, see stickied post on the subreddit.

Mils

Mils is still lurking in the shadows like a ninja. All will be revealed sooner or later.

Gavku

Gav made a new friend for you to play with. He is called Yeti until we can come up with something original. He’ll be in game once some programmer time frees up.

Dazzler

Chris has done more silliness. He is also getting to work on a trailer.