Playtest #1 ended a good while ago and the dust has pretty much settled. Everything went way beyond better than we ever could’ve imagined. We learned A TON and got a good grasp of what is working in the game. In this blog post we’ll assess some of the feedback we’ve received and how development has progressed in the aftermath, and what’s in store for the second playtest. Please feel free to comment and/or give feedback about anything discussed in this blog post in our Discord server.
Going into the playtest, we knew that feedback for certain topics will arise. Collector being somewhat pointless, no currency to spend, weapons being way overtuned, lack of controller support, lack of perks and so on. I’m glad that we did hear feedback from these because it does validate that these things matter, and these will be some of the core features to test in the next playtest. What we didn’t know, was how solid the design of our weapon system is. To our surprise people seemed to really love it even though it’s still in its infancy. It brings us lots of confidence to build upon it, and trust me, we have so much plans for it.
Weapon System
Watching people play, discuss and give feedback about the weapons, there was one clear trend: in a grid-based system calculating energy costs gets quite taxing cognitively. It’s also quite hard to get a grasp of how certain mods work, for example the Energy Savers, when the weapon loadout doesn’t show it. We’ve since improved it so that you can see bullets’ energy cost calculations in real-time when moving mods on the grid.
You can also see the total cost of all bullets in comparison to the weapon’s total capacity, as well as the recharge speed per second in comparison to the capacity. We’re also doing improvements on how easy it’s to see which mods are active.
Weapon parts
The different kinds of weapon parts were not distinct enough, weapons felt a bit same-y. Snipers were not enough sniper-like. Grenade launchers did not feel heavy and bursty enough. A clear lack of character on parts in general. This is one aspect we really want to improve. We are going to make the weapons more specialized by making their stats more polarized.
We are also introducing new weapon part types that sit inbetween the 3 major parts (stock, core, barrel), so in total there are 5 slots (stock, between, core, between, barrel.) These between parts are optional and supportive to the weapon. To name a few, these include
- extra barrels that shoot upwards, downwards or backwards
- protective shields, projectile deflector shields, projectile repulsors
- telescopes, laser sights, auto-aim turrets
- “static” parts which add energy saving mods to the grid, add more empty slots, or add other kinds of locked mods.
- and bunch more
In addition to between parts, we are adding some more interesting “non-weapons” as well, like the Harness-weapon. Harness is a weapon that attaches to the character’s torso while the weapon’s stock and barrel spin around the player.
We really want to allow the player to build all kinds of weird contraptions, so we’ll give you the tools to get creative.
Perks
Most of the current perks have still been a little bit on the boring side. Immunities, stat benefits and such, the standard stuff. We’re adding more perks as we go, but here are some recent ones.
Dual-wield perk
This perk allows the player to hold two light weapons at once. Light weapons right now are determined by their stock (remains to be seen if that stays so) and those include mostly pistols. Basically, the player can shoot main-hand (mouse1 / primary fire) and off-hand weapons (mouse2 / secondary fire) simultaneously!
Parachute Hat
The character’s hat is not just a plain old hat. It’s a technical marvel that can gain new features, like the parachute. With this perk, when falling, the character’s fall speed is dampened so that a safe fall happens most of the time.
This is useful, because just a while ago we’ve added fall damage / fall stun effects if you land too fast.
We love the hat, and we want to experiment on it a lot more.
Collector
Most of the feedback we received for the collector was about
- better visibility on how much of specific materials there exist in the tank
- faster material blow speed
The visibility has been improved by simply showing the amount of material pixels that exist in the tank when scrolling it. Also we now show the amount relative to the tank’s capacity in the material bar. Faster material blow speed is still in the works.
There was also a clear lack of purpose for the collector. We want to explore more use cases for materials in general for the next playtest. First example is simple, trading material. We have been prototyping a material converter machine that let’s you convert different materials to money at different values. This incentivises you to collect rare materials you find along the way to trade for money. Another trade you can do is Healium for Max HP increase. This creates an interesting trade-off situation where you have options:
- safe: spend Healium at the spot by absorbing and healing the character from HP loss of previous biome
- greedy: spend Healium to boost Max HP even if having low hp
- patient: stash all Healium in tank and preserve it for further use
The player can choose whether to be risky or not. It rewards a good player, since if you don’t take damage you can spend everything on Max HP increase.
Biomes and enemies
We have a goal to create two new biomes for the next playtest. This means authoring lots of new enemies which requires a good pipeline and tools to build them. A lot of time has been spent on this recently and now we have good capabilities to create a variety of interesting enemies. So far these are mostly showcases for creature movement, but we can create insects, various quadrupeds, spiders and many more.
Here are some examples of a furious blob, a camouflaging predator and some insects.
New biome: Sewer
A little sneak peek to the second biome (which some clever modders may already have found), the Sewer! It will be a place where strange creatures and lowly bandits exist in harmony. Large pipes with flowing liquid and wooden shack-like structures.
The goal is to introduce two new biomes for the next playtest so there’d be three in total.
Other notable developments
- Controller support
- Keybindings
- (death) clips/gifs
- Player has been rigged with a skeletal animation
- Lots of performance improvements
- Mods
- Enabling / disabling in settings
- Cumulative mods & ordering
- many more I cant remember
What’s next
There’s still a lot of work to be done for the next playtest. The current estimation for the next playtest is late November or early December, but we shall see how things progress.
Other good news are that we have settled on a name for the game: K********. More on that later once we get our Steam page up…