We're still really busy. We're shooting for something big for Space Dingus in late July, to coincide with Death Road to Canada. I can't say what it is yet, but it's keeping us crushed with work.

This developer log will cover our work last month, which covered a large amount of ground. There are also bonus sections for the Loadout Lockers and some new Character Customization options!

Since last month:

• Lots of work on object, player, and monster physics

  • Exploding barrel fun, with better effects and faster physics calculations

  • Better pushing of objects in the map, such as barrels, crates, space junk

  • Less jitter

  • Much less network traffic for pushing things, so less lag and better syncing

  • Better collision interactions for players vs enemies

  • Mass tweaks for everything

• More work on Mission Select

• Hitstop added! Feels weighty. This is configurable by weapon. We're currently thinking that edged weapons will have less hitstop than blunt ones

  

• More work on throwable objects. They feel really good now!

  • Lots of fixes for bugs related to mashing buttons while throwing things

• Sounds implemented for a lot of new things

• Further tweaks to design numbers for things like enemy and player health, enemy damage, weapon damage, and more

• Work on a new location type

  

Things we're doing currently:

• Better UI for health/ammo

• More weapon stats

• Limits on sounds for when there's a lot of things playing the same sound. EXAMPLE: 20 zombies yelling at once when they first see you

• Yet more work on events and event scripting. Big ongoing thing

• Work on settings screen

• More work on enemy spawning

• More work on the main menu, we didn't quite get to that last time

• Some further work on zombie aggro switching between players

  

For playtesting, we have a quick way for players to pick their Profession, starter stats, and equipment. We will get rid of these once we have character creation fully in, but I wanted to show them off for now.

Most professions will have a "default outfit", but you can easily turn this off. This functionality could also be used for things like special missions that change your outfit briefly. Such as EVA suits to protect your characters from the void of space, if they're cowards that can't hold their breath.

More additions to character customization, in-between tackling bigger work. It's easy to add little things as we go.

We added a bunch of class outfits, and broke them into dye-able parts. Some clothing items can have two colors to dye two different sections of the clothing. We also can support clothing that shows skin now, as illustrated by this weird tank top.

Lots of new faces, clothing, and hairstyles added. Look at this beautiful smile! Most face/head types have paired male and female "brother/sister" options.

Experimenting with two-color hairstyles more. We're thinking some can be "pick two tones it blends" style, and others can have a more "dye part of your hair" style.

New parts added for the Optics (eye) and Visage (mouth) slots. These aren't fully implemented yet, as there's still just the Hat slot for now.

We're mostly wrapping up some polish things right now, then moving on to a big system we haven't touched yet, but need to do sooner than we initially planned.

Next Dev Log will be on June 26th. It will mostly be playthrough footage, with a thumbs up or thumbs down if it looks like we're going to meet our mystery deadline for the July anniversary of Death Road.

Thanks for reading! You can discuss news as we post it in the #future-preview channel of our Official Discord[discord.gg], and on the site formerly known as Twitter.

We've been swamped! We keep having to shift back and forth between small parts and big new systems. Network code, UI, game logic, character customization work, and a revamped Mission Select menu.

As I've said in previous developer logs, our original plans changed. At first, our plan was to shoot for really simple tests. Instead of that, we decided to go for the full playable game loop. This means that we're now doing a lot of things at once.

This developer log will cover our work on a new Mission Selection system, and our further work and plans on the Character Customizer.

Since last month:

• Mission Selection system mostly done

  • Conveys a lot of info without needing to open up another window

  • Read next section for more details!

• Persistent crew tracking, for things like stats, health, loot, their appearances, traits, etc

• Further work on the new scripting and CYOA text system, with events

• Some more rooms for the YM Derelict station location type, including cafeteria variations

• Lots of work on Character Customization and UI

• Sound bugs that cropped up for awhile, now fixed

• Work on ambient sounds for all locations

• Hammering joining/disconnection logic for non-host players

• Zombie AI tweaks

• More sounds added to enemies, such as custom hit and pain sounds

• Tweaks to how mass works

  • Better configurable mass for everything. Enemies, decos, etc

  • Mass strongly effects what you can run through safely

• More tweaks to melee

  • Enemy hit aim tries to get enemies more towards the middle of your arc, rather than the ends (which would hit furniture more often)

  • Larger cleave weapons having a more unwieldy arc for accidentally hitting walls, smaller cleave weapons being more precise

• Tweaks to throwables for better physics

• NPC's complaining if you harass them

Things we're doing currently:

• Further work for the Mission Select

• Finishing up some last things on Crew setup and tracking

• Title Screen work (very placeholder right now)

• Work on Loadout UI

• Adjustments to knockdown chance

• Tracking down a "phantom lag" bug when leaving locations

We've been working on a revamp to how picking your next mission works. Our goals:

1. Convey more information so you know a little about what you're getting into, without needing spoilers. This applies to both for enemies and potential loot

2. Let you pick a mission quickly, so you're not keeping others waiting too long in multiplayer

3. Be very seamless, because this is something you will be doing a lot in the game

To be quick and seamless, we're avoiding any extra windows you have to go back and forth between. You will be able to mouseover any icon for info on enemies or loot. Then you click on a mission, and then click the ACCEPT button on the bottom.

• Each mission displays a description at the top, and then an indicator of the difficulty of that location

• Below that, there are icons for the location's Threats, big Prizes (the diamond icon), and common Supplies, respectively

• The last icon section, often blank, is for potential big hazards in the map. Things like Radiation, explosive traps, or unusual enemy aggression

At the bottom of each mission choice, there's space for your crew members to comment on the mission. What they say can be based on their traits, perks, skills, or other things. This is often for flavor, but sometimes they'll point out info you wouldn't have known otherwise.

You will usually be able to Reroll your missions, though this will take a specific resource. Currently these are called Warp Cores. I also want other ways to get rerolls past this, such as from special rewards in CYOA events.

Some things I want to add to the system:

• The Prizes section should also show things like safes, big loot rooms, and rescues. Currently it just shows rare loot.

• The icon frames should be able to expand and contract. Such as if there's 4 enemies in one map. Same for only have 1 or 2 sections for Prizes, as most maps won't have 3.

• Special treatment for really big missions, where there's only the choice of that one mission. These would likely use one big window, with more descriptive text under the info icons.

Making characters is so appealing to people, that we decided to make the character customizer UI a lot nicer. Here's what it looks like in-game, currently:

Right now you use arrows to switch between pieces, but the plan is to bring up a big submenu of all valid pieces you can pick by clicking on a category. You can also change the color or colors of any piece by clicking the color squares below it, which brings up a submenu of color choices.

We want the character customization menu to eventually look more like this:

There's a lot of empty space in the bottom right that we're not sure what to do with yet. Maybe a combination of different options for randomization, and possible in-game presets that your character picks in different situations.

We've floated the idea of being able to set a casual outfit for your character, and a mission outfit, and a hostile planet "hazardous" outfit. Then your characters would change clothes depending on the situation. We're not sure if we're going to stick with this idea or not.

After we're done with current work, we will be hunting final things we need for a good, presentable full game loop with all UI. Once we're done with that, we have a lot of different things we can focus on again for new content. I'd really like to get some new weapons in, as a big candidate.

Next Dev Log will be on May 29th. Before then, I'm going to start posting more playthrough videos on Discord and Twitter.

Thanks for reading! You can discuss news as we post it in the #future-preview channel of our Official Discord[discord.gg], and on the site formerly known as Twitter.